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Women entrepreneurship has grown significantly all over the world, and it is widely established that entrepreneurship is important for economic growth and wealth. Despite those facts, women’s participation in entrepreneurship is lower than men’s in almost all societies. Those phenomena get the attention of scholars from diverse disciplines, all of them interested in the behaviour and profile of female entrepreneurs and their business success rates. Several isolated factors were studied, with positive and negative effects on each stage of the entrepreneur process, for women entrepreneurs, so the purpose of this research is identify, classify by their impact and organise those factors in relation to the stages of the entrepreneur process.

The literature on factors affecting female entrepreneurship produced since January 2010 until October 2015 is analysed to define entrepreneurial success, identify factors affecting success at each stage of the entrepreneurial process and propose and organise those factors at individual and environment levels.

Several factors affecting female entrepreneurial success at each stage of the entrepreneurship process were found and organised at the internal (individual), micro, meso and macro environment level. In the literature reviewed, the most considered factors are: at the internal level, human capital, education and experience, with effects on the opportunity identification stage of the entrepreneurial process, and at the micro environment level, access to resources with effects on the opportunity recognition, acquiring resources and entrepreneurial performance stages, both with influence on quantitative and qualitative indicators of success.

This paper proposes an integrated classification and an array for all those factors that have an influence on women’s entrepreneurship and its success, relating those to the entrepreneurship process.

Women entrepreneurs are often categorized and assessed for various outcomes based on their start-up motivations. It is generally assumed that entrepreneurs with opportunity motivation have better performance when compared to necessity entrepreneurs. This study aims to test these suppositions through the lens of the entrepreneur’s motivation to learn (MTL) and level of female entrepreneurial competencies (FECs), namely, business and management, entrepreneurial, human relations (HR) and personal.

Data collected from 344 respondents through a survey questionnaire was analyzed using the structural equation modelling – partial least squares method using SmartPLS 4.

The findings highlight the need of recognizing the differentials between necessity and opportunity entrepreneurs as they were found to influence performance and learning outcomes. Opportunity entrepreneurship was found to significantly impact both MTL and the FECs. The authors also observed that business and management skills along with HR competencies played a greater role in the firm performance.

The findings demonstrate a case for specialized, tailor-made policy approaches rather than the “one size fits all” approach as evident in many government programs. As necessity entrepreneurs form a vital part of the Indian entrepreneurial ecosystem, apart from mentoring, need-based competency development programs may be looked at. Opportunity entrepreneurs may need support and encouragement through advanced skilling and uncomplicated funding options.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, empirical studies related to women-owned micro, small and medium enterprises in India establishing the relationship between start-up motivation and business performance are scarce. Even in the global context, this is one of the initial studies to examine the relationship through the lens of MTL and competencies.

This study explores the relationship between economic freedom and gender ideologies on the allocation of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship across countries. Opportunity entrepreneurship is typically understood as one’s best option for work, whereas necessity entrepreneurship describes the choice as driven by no better option for work. Specifically, we examine how economic freedom (i.e. each country’s policies that facilitate voluntary exchange) and gender ideologies (i.e. each country’s propensity for gendered separate spheres) affect the distribution of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship across countries.

We construct our sample by matching data from the following country-level sources: the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s Adult Population Survey (APS), the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom Index (EFI), the European/World Value Survey’s Integrated Values Survey (IVS) gender equality index, and other covariates from the IVS, Varieties of Democracy (V-dem) World Bank (WB) databases. Our final sample consists of 729 observations from 109 countries between 2006 and 2018. Entrepreneurial activity motivations are measured by the ratio of the percentage of women’s opportunity-driven total nascent and early-stage entrepreneurship to the percentage of female necessity-driven total nascent and early-stage entrepreneurship at the country level. Due to a first-order autoregressive process and heteroskedastic cross-sectional dependence in our panel, we estimate a fixed-effect regression with robust standard errors clustered by country.

After controlling for multiple macro-level factors, we find two interesting findings. First, economic freedom positively affects the ratio of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship. We find that the size of government, sound money, and business and credit regulations play the most important role in shaping the distribution of contextual motivations over time and between countries. However, this effect appears to benefit efficiency and innovation economies more than factor economies in our sub-sample analysis. Second, gender ideologies of political equality positively affect the ratio of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship, and this effect is most pronounced for efficiency economies.

This study offers one critical contribution to the entrepreneurship literature by demonstrating how economic freedom and gender ideologies shape the distribution of contextual motivation for women’s entrepreneurship cross-culturally. We answer calls to better understand the variation within women’s entrepreneurship instead of comparing women’s and men’s entrepreneurial activity. As a result, our study sheds light on how structural aspects of societies shape the allocation of women’s entrepreneurial motivations through their institutional arrangements.

Among the various global options for self-employment, venturing into the micro-enterprise sector has been recognized as an important way for employment generation and poverty alleviation in many developing/emerging economies. In this context, women-owned businesses at the grassroots play a vital role in developing countries like India far beyond contributing to job creation and economic growth. The informal sector is a sizeable and expanding feature of the contemporary global economy.

However, the informal economy operates at the cusp of the institutional framework, which makes them susceptible to many risks like lack of formal financing options, legal aid or increasing margin through access to formal markets. Non-Profit Development Agencies (NPDAs) have emerged as a viable and essential middle ground support in promoting women entrepreneurship in their capacity to contribute beyond governmental institutions.

The study adopted an inductive qualitative option through a case study design to explore the approaches adopted by NPDAs in promoting micro-entrepreneurship among women at the base of the pyramid (BoP) in the urban informal sector in India. The findings suggest that the NPDAs created an impact through the services, which translated into monetary earnings for the entrepreneurs. They could make financial contributions to their families, which boosted their self-confidence and overall personality. The findings also indicate positive changes like increased self-confidence, self-dependence, and inner strength as reported by the entrepreneurs.

In Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, entrepreneurship is not a very popular option among women. The low rate of entrepreneurship as a career choice among females is attributed to factors that are specific to females in GCC region. The purpose of this paper is to understand these variables and their interrelationships that lead to low rate of adoption of entrepreneurship as a career choice among females in GCC region.

The research followed a two-stage process; first, a comprehensive literature review was conducted to identify barriers to female entrepreneurship in GCC region. In the second stage, the identified barriers were modeled using fuzzy interpretive structural modeling technique to construct a hierarchical structure and the impact matrix cross-reference multiplication applied to a classification approach to analyze the control power and dependence among these barriers.

The research shows that there exists a group of barriers having a high driving power and low dependence requiring maximum attention and of strategic importance, while another group consists of those variables that have high dependence and are the resultant actions.

This research will help policy makers to focus on variables that are most important and requires immediate attention for the development and empowerment of female entrepreneurship in the GCC region. The paper suggests future course of action to provide an impetus to efforts aimed at improving female entrepreneurship in the GCC region.

The policy makers in the GCC region have accorded high priority to entrepreneurship to reduce the dependence of population on government jobs. This research is one of the few studies on female entrepreneurship conducted in GCC region to understand the impediments that limit the adoption of entrepreneurship as a career choice by women.

This paper aims to understand the nature of affective experiences that can help women to overcome perceived socio-cultural constraints and stimulate entrepreneurship. The paper focuses on rural poor women in India as they represent cultural contexts rich with impediments while also presenting an opportunity for socio-economic development.

A qualitative study with interpretative phenomenological analysis was conducted with participants from women-owned and -managed crafts-based cooperative entrepreneurial ventures from the state of Bihar in India.

Cooperative form of entrepreneurship and sisterhood among its members provides an environment for repeated affective experiences that inspire women to change the status quo. Sisterhood facilitates interactions with role models, mentee-driven mentoring and vicarious incentives, each producing positive affect, whereas cooperatives provide a work environment that fosters equality and helps women find their unique voice, generating affect. Together, the affect allows women to overcome fears associated with deviating from age-old traditions while engaging in entrepreneurial behaviors and sustaining them.

The paper advances knowledge on women entrepreneurship for non-Western cultural contexts, particularly the environments and experiences that stimulate entrepreneurship. The values of cooperative form of entrepreneurship and the homophily among sisters creates an environment which is relaxed and comfortable, where affective experiences can be naturally embedded in daily routines in contrast to those created through formal-structured training programmes. The paper findings are limited to cultural contexts of rural women in eastern states of India with high levels of poverty.

Policies for cooperative entrepreneurship and grassroots support to facilitate an environment to foster cooperatives’ values, and sisterhood can lead to affective experiences necessary for change that endures.

Entrepreneurship for pervasive social change, such as alleviating rural women from poverty, needs theory development, particularly a better understanding of the influence of macro socio-cultural contexts on women’s ability to be entrepreneurial. This paper provides an understanding of contextually relevant affective experiences conducive for rural women entrepreneurship.

Women play an essential role in entrepreneurship because they have been able to make social and economic contributions in many countries. However, women continue encountering numerous difficulties when engaging in entrepreneurial activities, particularly from a societal perspective. Therefore, it is necessary to study the underlying factors influencing women's entrepreneurial intentions that lead to their success in entrepreneurship. This study examines gender stereotype perceptions, perceived social support and self-efficacy in women's entrepreneurial intentions in Batik micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in West Java, Indonesia.

This study used a quantitative method by randomly distributing questionnaires to women entrepreneurs in the MSME sector in the batik craft industry in the Trusmi area, West Java, Indonesia. The research questionnaire was completed by 150 female entrepreneurs, and a structural equation model-partial least squares (PLS) was employed to examine the hypotheses proposed in this study.

The findings of this study revealed that gender stereotype perception and perceived social support have a positive and significant effect on self-efficacy. Gender stereotype perceptions affect women's entrepreneurial intentions, both directly and mediated by self-efficacy. Meanwhile, perceived social support has a significant effect on women's entrepreneurial intention only when it is mediated by self-efficacy.

This study presents empirical evidence on how gender stereotype perception, perceived social support and self-efficacy affect women's entrepreneurial intentions and establishes a novel conceptual framework for women's entrepreneurship in emerging economies. This study provides academic and practical implications by identifying the entrepreneurial intentions of women who have carried out entrepreneurial activities. This study also provides direction for policymakers to encourage women's entrepreneurial intentions.

Unlike other populations, entrepreneurs may be unable to fully escape from job-related stress due to their financial and/or psychological connection to their ventures. The authors argue that stress is a universal, intangible variable that profoundly influences the entrepreneurial process. In the present review, the authors critically synthesize past literature to evaluate the substantive body of research on stress in entrepreneurship and assess the impact of stress on individuals’ well-being. The authors find that entrepreneurial stress stems from role conflict or overload, issues related to business operations, and concerns from life outside the venture. Further, stress may result in changes to personal satisfaction and psychological well-being, contingent upon an individual’s stress tolerance, coping strategies, or recovery practices. The entrepreneurial process, from creation to exit, is comprised of several transition periods, all of which are uniquely stressful. The authors explore the implications of our findings by discussing stressors that may manifest during each stage of the entrepreneurial process. Therefore, the authors respond to calls for more dynamic investigation of entrepreneurial stress while also highlighting the need for more research into stressors associated with specific entrepreneurial activities.

The main objective of this research is to exploratorily analyse different factors that influence the decision of the senior population (+50 years) to engage in entrepreneurship activities in a group of Latin American countries. This study considers the motivations for entrepreneurship (opportunity and necessity) and the level of development of the countries.

The authors used data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) with a sample of 22,139 observations of senior individuals in seven Latin American countries surveyed between 2013 and 2017. The authors also used the Human Development Index to capture the relevance of the level of development. The authors employed a multilevel logistic regression model to test the study hypotheses.

The study results show that individual factors such as personal income, education and occupation have a significant influence on the probability of entrepreneurship of senior individuals. Related to contextual factors, the level of human development of a country has a negative influence mainly on opportunity-based entrepreneurs.

Because of the rapidly ageing population in Latin America, understanding senior entrepreneurs and their motivations is very relevant not only in terms of theoretical development but also for policy and practical implications, primarily those related to labour markets and social protection.

The study aims to understand why women-owned microenterprises (WOMEs) in India experience a lower growth rate, where growth can be represented in increments in the venture’s size or scope. There is no conclusive understanding of the factors that affect the sustained growth of WOMEs in India.

What personal, social and economic factors support or hinder the choice, growth and sustainability of women-owned ventures? What role do institutional factors (government, nongovernment organizations (NGOs), self-help groups and microfinance institutions) play toward the sustainability of WOMEs? The answers to these questions were obtained through a qualitative design by interviewing 30 micro women entrepreneurs from Tamil Nadu, a Southern state of India and one of the largest hubs for WOMEs and their responses were content analyzed using NVivo 12 software.

The findings capture and apply the fundamentals of two key theoretical perspectives, resource-based view (RBV) and self-determination theory (SDT), in identifying the links between the individual, social and economic factors and their combined effect on the sustained growth of women-owned micro businesses. The findings add value in identifying the ingrained cultural norms and traditions and several internal and external factors that support or challenge the growth of WOMEs. This study highlights that the interventions by the government need to be strengthened for the growth and sustainability of WOMEs.

The study’s findings provide suggestions to policymakers, banks, funding agencies, financial institutions and NGOs to design applicable policies and schemes toward the sustained growth of WOMEs.

This study contributes toward a better understanding of the trends in the context of WOMEs from an Indian context. This topic has received little attention in the academic literature. Second, the study’s conceptual contribution is an application of SDT and RBV to understand and categorize the enablers and deterrents in the path of growth of WOMEs, which is a novel pursuit.