Abstract
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.
Introduction
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).
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.
