TY - THES A1 - Zimmermann, Eyleen T1 - Female Social Entrepreneurship as a Leverage for Transforming Tourism N2 - Social entrepreneurship is becoming increasingly popular and important in today's world. The focus is on social start-ups that anchor social and environmental sustainability as a fixed corporate purpose. The results of this thesis show that social start-ups make a measurable, positive contribution to tackle the social and ecological challenges of our world. Because in times of multiple crises, socially added value for society should come before traditional profit maximization in an economic context. The tourism industry is a vulnerable economic sector, strongly influenced by the impact of ecological and social crises (Heinrichs and Bartels, 2010). Investigations indicate that there is a growing interest in distant countries, their cultures, and their natural resources. Taking a closer look at the tourism industry, it becomes clear that it is strongly dominated by women (World Tourism Organization, 2019). But aren't women the ones who could change the industry through social entrepreneurship, as also social entrepreneurship is carried out by more women than men? This master thesis, therefore, deals with the question of what motivated female founders of social enterprises in tourism to start their businesses and how these motivational factors interact with their environment. A qualitative study was conducted in the framework of the Social Entrepreneurship Competition in Tourism. Investigations show that the motivational factors and their interaction with the environment strongly depend on the entrepreneurial context. Furthermore, it was found that women are further strengthened by their social environment, as well as by their confidence in their own abilities to carry out their motivations for a socially added value in the entrepreneurial context. Often it is external influences, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, (lack of) political framework conditions, structural discrimination, or bureaucracy, that hinder women from implementing their social start-up the way they want to. The results obtained within this thesis, refer to the database of the Social Entrepreneurship Competition in Tourism in 2021 and 2022. KW - Social Entrepreneurship KW - Female Entrepreneurship KW - Entrepreneurship in Tourism KW - Women in Tourism Y1 - 2022 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:eb1-opus-4157 ER -