Introduction
Studies on women entrepreneurship
have witnessed a rapid growth over the past 30 years. The field is in an
adolescence stage with a considerable number of journal articles, literature
reviews and books being published on women entrepreneurs. The objective of this
study is twofold. First is to examine the number of papers published on women
entrepreneurship in 12 established entrepreneurship journals from 1900 to 2016.
Second is to assess the growth of the field by specifically reviewing literature
reviews published from 1980s till 2016 and put forward future research
directions. Our review findings suggest that there is still a long way to go in
terms of building a strong theoretical base for research on women
entrepreneurship. The lens of feminist theories can be applied in conjunction
with the existing entrepreneurship theories to advance the field.
Methodologically, past research is dominated by the positivist paradigm and
there is a need to embrace innovative methods to build explanations using a
constructionist approach. Further, studies are mostly restricted within
national boundaries primarily being conducted in developed economies. There is
a need to build transnational networks and foster professional communities to
enable the growth of the field.
Till the 1990s, mainstream academic
journals and leading newspapers in the US perceived women owned firms as only
small lifestyle businesses or sole proprietorship firms (Baker et al. 1997). The male-centered business model was considered as the
natural model of doing business. However, research on women entrepreneurs’
reveals that entrepreneurship is a gendered phenomenon and entrepreneurial activities
can be rooted in families (Jennings and Brush 2013).
Emerging literature suggests that
women can play a significant role in the larger entrepreneurship phenomenon and
economic development (Sarfaraz et al., 2014). As a result, there is an insistent need to investigate
various dimensions of women entrepreneurship. The existing theoretical concepts
need to be expanded to better explain the uniqueness of women entrepreneurship
as a subject of research inquiry.
Addressing the need to build a
better understanding, this paper attempts to present an overview of the field
and highlight future research directions. In particular, this paper has two
broad objectives. The first objective is to highlight the mainstream
entrepreneurship journals and explore the number of papers published on women
entrepreneurship in these journals till date. The second objective of the paper
is to review the growth of the field and present an analysis of the literature
review papers published on women entrepreneurship till 2016.
The paper is organized as follows.
First, we discuss the growth and chronological history of the field of women
entrepreneurship. Then, we discuss the research review approach followed in the
paper and present the findings from our search using e-databases. Next, we
present a summary and analysis of the literature review papers published from
the 1980s till 2016. Finally, we discuss directions for future research and
conclude the paper.
Women
entrepreneurship: chronological history of the field
The literature on mainstream
entrepreneurship primarily focusing on the male entrepreneur emerged in the
1930s. The late 1970s witnessed the emergence of an explicit sub-domain of
women entrepreneurship (Jennings and Brush, 2013). This section outlines the chronological history of
development of the literature on women/female entrepreneurship. Table 3
presents a summary of the key historical milestones in this sub-domain.
In 1976, Schwartz published the
first academic paper on female entrepreneurship in the Journal of Contemporary
Business and the first policy report in this area titled “The bottom line:
Unequal enterprise in America” was released in 1979 in Washington DC. Hisrich
and O’Brien (1981) made the first academic conference presentation on women
entrepreneurs at the Babson College Conference on Entrepreneurship in 1981. The
first academic book on female entrepreneurs was published in 1985 (Goffee and
Scase, 1985).
Initial research on entrepreneurship
assumed that male and female entrepreneurs were generally the same and there
was no specific need for a separate investigation (Bruni et al. 2004). As a result, the sub-domain of women entrepreneurship did
not develop as a significant area until the late 1990s to early 2000s (Jennings
and Brush, 2013) with the launch of two dedicated conferences. First, a
policy oriented Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)
Conference on women entrepreneurs in small and medium sized enterprises was
held in 1998. Second, an academic conference Diana International was held in
2003.
It was not until 2009 that a niche
journal titled the International Journal of Gender and Entrepreneurship was
launched. Eventually, leading journals in the mainstream Entrepreneurship area
recognized the growing need for research in this area. The journal of
Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice published a special issue on women
entrepreneurship in 2006 and 2007 (de Bruin et al. 2006) and then again in 2012 (Hughes et al., 2012).
Table 1
and Fig. 1
summarize our search results. Table 2
lists all the selected entrepreneurship journals along with the total number of
185 papers published on women entrepreneurs. Amongst the mainstream
entrepreneurship journals, we find that the Journal of Small Business
Management published the first paper in 1973, which was followed by the Journal
of Business Venturing in 1988. Total number of papers published in the
mainstream journals from 1900s till 2016 was 185 with the Journal of Small
Business Management having the maximum number of papers. Interestingly, we find
two mainstream entrepreneurship journals having no papers on women
entrepreneurship. These two journals are Economics of Innovation and New
Technology and the International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior and
Research.
Table 1
Fig. 1
Papers on Women Entrepreneurs in
established Entrepreneurship Journals
Table 2
List of Entrepreneurship Journals
and Papers Published on Women Entrepreneurs
Journal
Name
|
First
article published in Year
|
Total
papers (1900–2016)
|
|
1
|
Economics of Innovation and New
Technology
|
-
|
0
|
2
|
Entrepreneurship & Regional
Development
|
1998
|
11
|
3
|
Entrepreneurship: Theory &
Practicea
|
1991
|
34
|
4
|
Industry and Innovation
|
2010
|
1
|
5
|
International Journal of
Entrepreneurial Behavior and Research
|
-
|
0
|
6
|
International Journal of
Entrepreneurship and Innovation
|
2007
|
5
|
7
|
International Review of
Entrepreneurship
|
2015
|
1
|
8
|
International Small Business
Journal
|
1998
|
18
|
9
|
Journal of Business Venturinga
|
1988
|
26
|
10
|
Journal of Small Business and
Enterprise Development
|
2003
|
16
|
11
|
Journal of Small Business Management
|
1973
|
46
|
12
|
Small Business Economics
|
1996
|
27
|
Total Number of Papers
|
185
|
Figure 1
graphically illustrates the number of papers published in the 1900s and
2000–2016 in the 10 journals. The two journals mentioned earlier that had no
papers on women entrepreneurship were dropped from this graph. We found a total
of 138 papers published during the 2000 to 2016 time period. This clearly
illustrates a substantial increase from a total number of 46 papers published
during the 1900s. Except for two journals, namely the Journal of Business
Venturing and the Journal of Small Business Management we see that the increase
in publication trend is clearly visible in Fig. 1.
During the 2000–2016, the Journal of Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice
published the maximum number of papers (total 28) followed by Small Business
Economics publishing 25 papers, Journal of Small Business Management publishing
22 papers and the Journal of Business Venturing publishing 13 papers. It is
advisable to note that the journal list in Table 2
is only indicative of the existing established entrepreneurship journals and
scholars seeking potential publication outlets can also consider other upcoming
journals or interdisciplinary journals that are open to publishing research on
women entrepreneurship.
Next, a second round of search was
conducted for literature review articles published on women entrepreneurship in
management and social science journals. We used a combination of keywords
“female” or “women” or “gender” and “entrepreneur” and “review” or “literature”
in the paper title using e-databases like EBSCO, ProQuest and Google Scholar.
Only relevant review articles were shortlisted for our analysis after reading
the abstracts. We also selected a comprehensive review article by Jennings and
Brush (2013) published in The Academy of Management Annals as our
foundation review paper. This paper helped us in identifying few more review
articles that did not get covered in our search in paper titles. In all, we
found 19 relevant literature review articles on women entrepreneurship
published from 1986 till May 2016. These are discussed in detail under the
Reviews section that follows.
Reviews
An increase in the number of papers
on women entrepreneurs resulted in publications of literature reviews to
comprehend the state of the field. Table 3
presents a summary of the literature reviews published in research journals
from 1986 to May 2016. There were two review papers published in the 1980s,
five reviews in 1990s and twelve review papers in 2000s (up to 2016). These are
covered in detail in the following sub-sections.
Build
theoretical explanations for gender based comparisons of business owners
In the 1990s, as the number of women
business owners grew the number of research studies on women entrepreneurs also
grew (Brush, 1992). Initial research was primarily focused on listing
similarities and dissimilarities between male and female business owners.
Differences were reported on educational background, occupation, motivation and
method of business creation and growth. Researchers like Fischer et al. (1993) suggest that the differences reported in literature
between male and female entrepreneurs were speculations and largely
atheoretical in nature. There is a need to build more theoretical explanations
and move beyond recording differences.
For example, Brush (1992) proposed an integrated perspective explaining gender
related differences using psychological and sociological theories. This is
different from the economic perspective of firm creation and assumes women
entrepreneurs to perceive their businesses as cooperative networks of
relationships involving family, society and personal relationships. Fischer et
al. (1993) suggests using theories of liberal feminism and social
feminism to understand undefined male and female socialization differences,
which can help explain why men and women run their businesses in different yet equally
effective ways.
Extend
existing theories of entrepreneurship using a feminist perspective
There exists a debate in literature
whether a new theory on women entrepreneurship is required. Many researchers
suggest that the existing concepts of entrepreneurship itself can be used in
conjunction with feminist theories to extend the theoretical foundation of the
larger entrepreneurship field. In the past, many theoretical lenses have been
used to examine the phenomenon of women entrepreneurship. For example, Bowen
and Hisrich (1986) used career theory to propose a career model of women’s
entrepreneurial behavior; Brush (1992) used psychological and sociological theories to explain
gender-based differences; Brush et al. (2009) used institutional theory to propose gender as a social
construct; and Sullivan and Meek (2012) used expectancy theory, regulatory focus theory and social
cognitive theory to study entrepreneurial process model concepts. Ahl (2006) reports the use of many feminist theories like the liberal
feminist theory, social feminist theory, psychoanalytical feminist theory,
radical feminist theory, social constructionist and post-structural feminist
theory. To advance our understanding of this field, there is also a need to
make a shift in epistemological position from how gender is done to how social
orders are gendered (Ahl, 200; Ahl and Nelson, 2010). Research efforts in this direction are likely to offer a
richer perspective on women entrepreneurship. Scholars can use the existing
concepts of entrepreneurship and ground them in feminist theories.
Study
entrepreneurial processes of women founded business models
Women entrepreneurs comprise about a
half of human resources in developing economies (World Bank, 2009). Despite an influx of women entering the field of
entrepreneurship in developing countries (Gichuki et al., 2014), very few authors have explicitly examined the
entrepreneurial processes of women founded businesses (de Bruin et al., 2007). In reality, women in developing countries are more likely
to face complex barriers to entry and unequal access to resources and networks
(Goyal and Yadav, 2014). Thus, there is a need to build an in-depth understanding
of the business models of women founded firms from prelaunch to launch and post
launch phases (Sullivan and Meek, 2012). Scholars can use the lens of process theories to
understand the influence of gender in business models.
Expand
the scope of research on women entrepreneurs: context and content
Our review findings suggest that
there is a need to expand the scope of research on women entrepreneurs
involving the context as well as the content of the research. de Bruin et al. (2007) report that the Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice
journal’s special issue had generated interest on the topic in the researcher
community and the special issue’s countries of submission included countries
like United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Bulgaria, Denmark, Germany,
Switzerland, Finland, Italy, Norway, Sweden, New Zealand, Spain, Australia,
China, France, India, Malaysia, Iran, Pakistan and Ghana. Despite the interest,
we find that most of the literature on women entrepreneurship reports empirical
studies primarily from the west. There are very few studies that explore this
phenomenon in a developing economy context and there is a need for research on
women entrepreneurs in developing countries (Gundry et al., 2002; Goyal and Yadav, 2014).
Further, the context can also be
expanded in terms of the women entrepreneurship environment to study
comparisons among class (upper, middle and lower), sectors (manufacturing,
services and others), regions (urban and rural) and nations. Scholars can
design studies to examine the impact of factors like industry, family, culture
and goal orientation in women founded enterprises (Gundry et al., 2002). It would be interesting to observe horticultural and
economic class differences across nations with different cultural backgrounds.
Content-wise, there is a need to
move beyond the individualist focus of the female entrepreneur and include more
factors like contingency studies or comparative studies (Ahl, 2006). For instance, contingency studies can explore external
factors like legislation, social norms, family policy, economic policy, labor
market structures, and the degree of female business owner’s involvement. From
a macro perspective, scholars can explore links between income class,
educational attainment and women entrepreneurship. To foster entrepreneurship
among young women, it would be useful to explore entrepreneurial intentions of
young women from varied socioeconomic and class backgrounds in different
cultural contexts.
Conclusion
The field of women entrepreneurship
has come a long way since its emergence in the late 1970s. In this paper we report
findings from 19 literature reviews on women entrepreneurship that were
published between 1986 and 2016. We find that the initial studies on
entrepreneurship primarily assumed male and female entrepreneurs to be the same
and found no explicit need for a separate investigation. As a result, research
on women entrepreneurship did not develop as a distinct domain until the late
1990s to early 2000s. This development witnessed the emergence of professional
communities like the Diana International project, dedicated conferences and
niche journals in this area. Mainstream entrepreneurship journals also
acknowledged the need for research in this area and came out with special
issues to advance the body of knowledge on women entrepreneurship.
Many studies in the past borrowed
theoretical concepts from areas that were not valid for the women
entrepreneurship domain. There is a need to be inclusive of diverse voices and
consider constructionist approaches to explore traditional as well as
non-traditional questions. Particularly, there is a need to use the lens of
feminist theories to capture heterogeneity in women entrepreneurship research
and extend existing entrepreneurial theories. There is also a need to study
entrepreneurial processes of women founded business models and adopt
inattentiveness in research method choices.
In my Opinion results can also be
beneficial for startup managers and women entrepreneurs. In practice, aspiring
women entrepreneurs can benefit by gaining access to apprenticeship in target
industries. This experience can help them prepare better prior to launching
their own business in that particular industry. Specifically, gaining exposure
to a business start-up can be beneficial. Further, much of the collaborations
in the women entrepreneurship area are still restricted within national
boundaries and there is a need to build research as well as practice networks
across transnational borders.
