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.
Highlights
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 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
Summary
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). 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. The first objective of this paper was to identify and analyze the leading research journals in the broader area of entrepreneurship with a focus on women entrepreneurship papers This analysis would help us reflect on the progress of the field and act as a potential source of published research reviews on women entrepreneurship. We find two mainstream entrepreneurship journals having no papers on women entrepreneurship
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