Brazil: The Challenge of Female Successors in a Brazilian Family Business: A Case Study

Family-controlled companies are the main source of private property in several industrial sectors in Latin America (Gersick et al., 2006). According to the International Family Enterprise Research Academy (2003), family companies in Brazil comprised more than 90 percent of private companies and produced 65 percent of the gross national product in 2003. For the first time, according to data published in the 2009 Global Entrepreneurship report (Brazilian Institute for Quality and Productivity, 2010), there are currently more female (53.4 percent) than male (46.6 percent) entrepreneurs starting companies through opportunity. ¹