Do Women Differ From Men in Ranking Desired Franchise Characteristics?
By: Michael Alston for Franchise Insights
October 1, 2025 – In over five years of surveying individuals researching franchises, we have seen both consistency in the rankings of most important characteristics, and shifts associated with tectonic events like the outbreak of the Covid virus on attitudes about pandemic resilience, remote work and work flexibility.
In the FranchiseInsights.com Small Business Startup Sentiment Index™, respondents are asked to rank eight franchise characteristics in order of importance to their ultimate selection, along with a “not important to me” option for each. The data presented above are weighted averages of the responses ranked by individual respondents.
For the first time, we look at the results by self-reported gender in desired characteristics to discover any differences which might inform both the franchise development sales process and targeted recruitment.
In segmenting three months of surveys by gender, from June to August 2025, there are two outstanding observations.
First, it is remarkable how little difference there is between males and female respondents on the ranking of characteristics they find most attractive in a franchise. “Low cost of entry” and “higher earnings potential” have consistently been ranked most important by individuals seeking business ownership regardless of gender.
Women and men are remarkably similar in their rankings of desired characteristics, though aspects of work flexibility separate them somewhat.
Differences emerge when you begin to compare aspects of control over working conditions – including “flexibility of work schedule” and “ability to work from home” which were the only two characteristics that females valued more than males.
But the difference for “flexibility of work schedule” was ranked so highly by women that when averaged with men it rose to the third ranked franchise characteristic overall as reported last week, even though it was ranked fifth by men.
The chart below shows the categories with the greatest weighted-average differences between the sexes.
“Flexibility of work schedule” showed the greatest positive difference (ranked higher by women), while “pandemic resilience” had the second greatest difference, with women ranking it lower.
What does this all mean? There is certainly a segment of women desiring franchise ownership who value flexible working conditions more highly (e.g. those ranking them first through third in the below chart – about 47%), but these may not be representative of the female prospect population (nor the male population). Furthermore, franchises that inherently offer greater work flexibility will be especially attractive to women who are seeking that attribute.
For the general population, attributes like “extensive training and support” and ‘systems and technology platform” are more important.
FranchiseInsights.com compiles the monthly Small Business Startup Sentiment Index™ (SSI) of individuals who have recently inquired about businesses for sale. Data for this analysis was from the period June to August 2025.
Franchise Ventures is the leading franchise lead-generation platform for potential franchisees to thousands of growing franchise systems in the United States and Canada. Its franchise lead generation brands include Franchise.com, Franchise Solutions, Franchise Gator, Franchise Opportunities, Franchise For Sale, SmallBusinessStartup.com and BusinessBroker.net, and together they provide the largest aggregation of prospective franchise buyers in the U.S.
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Published on Wednesday, October 1st, 2025.