Female entrepreneurship: Theoretical perspectives and empirical evidence

Abstract

The past thirty years have seen the development of a burgeoning academic literature investigating the small firms sector from a range of different disciplinary perspectives. In a diverse and increasingly specialised research area, it is notable that relatively few studies consider the position of women as business owners. A notable assessment of the literature argued that female entrepreneurship had been ‘neglected’ both by the mass media and the academic community (Baker et al., 1997). Scholars have contested that the research literature assumes entrepreneurship to be a male activity (Brush, 1992; Berg, 1997), describing theories of entrepreneurship as being ‘created by men, for men and applied to men’ (Holmquist and Sundin, 1989:1). As this chapter will attempt to demonstrate, women’s entrepreneurship may be regarded as a minority interest, but the issue is far from neglected. The most recent review of the gender and enterprise research literature sponsored by the UK Small Business Service revealed over 400 peer-reviewed academic papers and numerous popular articles (Carter et al., 2001). The gender and enterprise research field is perhaps more accurately portrayed as under-developed. Despite a growing enthusiasm among researchers and policy makers to focus on issues relating to gender and enterprise, and a marked increase in the number of studies investigating the area, there has been a failure to build adequate explanatory theories, particularly around the concept of gender and how the experiences of female entrepreneurs reflect those within the wider socio-economic context.

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