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Marginalization of women in STEM sectors is a widely discussed trend that has percolated into the corporate sector. The purpose of this study is to identify factors that act as barriers to entry to female entrepreneurs and to understand the impact of these factors in the context of startup landscape. The scope of this paper covers chiefly first-generation entrepreneurs while elaborating the presence of the Lucite ceiling effect. It aims to categorize and elucidate the responsible variables while developing a model for the same.

The research is an exploratory study that provides a complex picture of how female entrepreneurs understand and experience the work culture at their workplace. The population under consideration is “urban startups”; these have been characterized as technology/non-technology-based and non-agricultural in nature. The sample in the study consists of male and female entrepreneurs of first-generation entrepreneurs belonging to the urban middle class and either founders or co-founders. The exploration presents a groundbreaking examination based on narrative inquiry and semi-structured interviews.

The research led to distinct findings that can be utilized to improve the condition of female entrepreneurs and encourage their involvement in the ecosystem. The model is proposed on the basis of extrinsic and intrinsic factors, which lead to the Lucite ceiling phenomenon. The causes ranging from family pressure to fulfilling relevant requirements such as financing the venture were classified under these. Ultimately, inferences were drawn as to how these may be affecting the growth of women in the sectors.

The identified intrinsic and extrinsic factors have been detailed, presenting further opportunities to focus on specific metrics by the stakeholders, namely, the policy-makers and the entrepreneur community. The study has been limited to urban startups to allow for convenience sampling, which is justified considering the issues highlighted in the existing knowledge. While this study has been carried out in the context of urban startups, it leaves scope for extension and extrapolation of the presented model in the rural context.

The study presents a formally structured representation of the issues faced by female entrepreneurs in a manner which is mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive. Such a categorization can, in the contemporary times, enable targeted mitigation of the same through well-planned policy initiatives and legislation. In addition, it provides a strong baseline for extensive quantitative research in this field, especially in the context of emerging economies in fast-developing nations.

The framework helps lay a groundwork for thoughtful research on women’s entrepreneurship. The Lucite ceiling phenomenon is a more aggravated version of the “glass ceiling”. The reasons for the prevalence of this effect in this context have not been explored before, thus providing a great scope to be further investigated.

This article aims to provide a qualitative analysis of the diversity management challenges of professionals in corporate America. A specific focus is on the differential outcomes of women and ethnic minorities and their equal employment opportunities in the workplace.

This paper examined the workplace experiences of 42 African‐American and Caucasian men and women in corporate America. Semi‐structured interviews were held to discover diversity management issues unique to these groups.

It was found that challenges supported a priori assertions of organizational culture, discrimination/stereotyping, and human capital investments. Each of these challenges impacted members in qualitatively different ways that may account for the variability in work experiences and outcomes. While there were some consistent themes, the findings demonstrated significant within race and between gender differences.

Qualitative studies provide in‐depth information and a deeper understanding about phenomena which allows one to capture general themes that can be obscured in survey research. The intersection of race and gender provides unique findings that should be considered in future research. The use of self‐reported perceptual data without triangulation can limit the generalizability of the study but does provide a view in the language and emotion of the individual who is sharing his/her workplace experience.

The findings demonstrate that diversity management practices need to consider race, gender, as well as multiple group memberships (e.g. African‐American women) which reveals unique issues to be addressed within organizational contexts. There are also differences within race, by gender, in the ways that individuals experience the workplace. The findings provide insight for managers to aid in diversity management and retention.

Race is socially constructed and has a political rather than biological basis for determining it. Racial categories in one country which limit an individual's power, influence, freedom, and clout may be very different than categories in another country or political context. Because race is socially constructed, individuals may increase or lose power, privilege, influence and status as they move from one sociopolitical context/power structure in one country to another.

This research provides an additional lens through which to examine the workplace experiences of women and minorities to aid managers in deriving the maximum benefit in a diverse, well‐qualified labor force.

Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are tasked with driving economic recovery globally, particularly through knowledge diffusion and consequently, government policy-makers strive to encourage innovation activity to benefit their economies. Entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs) are increasingly used as a framework through which such policies are funnelled, but an increased focus on high-growth, scale-up entrepreneurship risks overlooking the effects of entrepreneurship on social groups affected by multiple sets of disadvantage. This chapter identifies and analyses the existing research on disadvantaged entrepreneurship and the EE via a systematic review of the literature and then briefly outlines how the chapters contained within this book seek to address the gaps found.

Technology sector is the pivotal element for innovation and economic development of any country. Hence, the present article explores past researches looking into challenges faced by immigrant women entrepreneurs in technology sector and their corresponding response strategies.

This study employs a systematic literature review (SLR) technique to collate all the relevant literature looking into the challenges and strategies from immigrant women entrepreneur's perspective and provide a comprehensive picture. Overall, 49 research articles are included in this SLR.

Findings indicate that immigrant status further escalates the human, financial and network disadvantages faced by women who want to start a technology-based venture.

This paper contributes to the literature by categorizing the barriers and strategies on a 3 × 2 matrix reflecting the origins of the barrier or strategy (taking place at the individual, firm or institutional level) versus the type of the barrier or strategy (arising from being an immigrant woman and being a woman in the technology sector). After underlining the dearth of studies in the literature about the complex phenomenon of immigrant WEs in the technology sector, the paper points out several neglected themes for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on women’s entrepreneurship in emerging economies. This is a thematic review to identify patterns and trends to better understand this literature. From the analysis, this study offers ideas for useful and theoretically informed research. In addition, this paper proposes the concept of restricted agency that helps to explain the practice.

This study identifies the nature, what is interesting, what it sees as important and considers what is neglected in this literature. The analysis sought important issues, interesting directions and the potential for useful future work. Thematic analysis is ideal for messy and unstructured material such as the literature used in this study as the data set. The process is qualitative, iterative and inductive but ontologically appropriate for the socially produced knowledge of the literature.

This paper finds the literature tends towards descriptive papers. Few papers make substantial contributions to theory. Many papers reported the barriers women to encounter, reporting general and typical processes of responding to obstacles and the implications for practice. Interestingly this study perceives overcoming and sometimes using, the cultural and physical restraints of gendered entrepreneurship. This paper proposes the concept of restricted agency explaining the gendering of entrepreneurs and explains what they can do. Moreover, the concept helps explain why and what. Most promising theoretically, is how the application of this agency is slowly and contextually differently changing the rules of the game.

This study covers a large and extensive literature, so might have missed themes.

This paper starts with the notion of the “otherness” of women’s entrepreneurship. The literature is good at explaining both how and why women’s entrepreneurship is different and in effect, marginalised. This study conceptualises this gendering process as a restricted agency. Moreover, the concept helps explain why and what. Most promising theoretically, is how the application of this agency is slowly and contextually differently changing the rules of the game. It may be the mechanism for emancipation.

This study aims to understand the socio-cultural context of Indian women's high-tech entrepreneurial experience. Despite a small proportion of women entrepreneurs, and the traditional gender dynamics among the educated middle-classes that appears to be antithetical to female entrepreneurship; women-led high-tech start-ups are on the rise.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with women founders at an academic incubator in an elite Indian Institute of Technology. The study was based on the post-structural feminist approach that women entrepreneurs are embedded in their socio-cultural and institutional context. During data collection, the Coronavirus lockdown provided a natural experiment, highlighting entrepreneurial response to unforeseen obstacles.

It finds that the context is significant in constructing opportunity, and in navigating challenges of gender and entrepreneurship. Further, in the process of construction of an entrepreneurial identity, women innovators not only reproduce, but also modify their context. Also, the experiences with academic incubator indicate positive results both for gender dynamics and enhancing an emergent entrepreneurial culture.

The study highlights that women's high-tech entrepreneurship has considerable potential for enhancing women's status in society through the support of academic incubator. This has certain implications for policy.

It provides an insight in to the hitherto neglected issue of women's high-tech entrepreneurship in India, and argues that a study of “social embeddedness” not only highlights constraints for women entrepreneurs unique to that context, but also the potential of women's entrepreneurship in advancing women's agency and gender equality.

This paper aims to explore the entrepreneurial journey of select women entrepreneurs from South India to provide qualitative insights into the factors influencing their career choice (to become and continue as an entrepreneur) and to identify the drivers of their growth and well-being.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted to gather data from 35 women entrepreneurs in the micro, small and medium enterprises sectors of Tamil Nadu, India. Data were content analyzed using NVivo 12.

Qualitative content analysis identified three broad themes and several sub-themes to suggest a conceptual framework reflecting the possible relationships among them. Women entrepreneurs’ career choice, the growth of their ventures and their well-being were found to be significantly driven by a blend of personal attributes, strong family support and institutional support.

The findings will help the government to provide appropriate institutional support with customized initiatives and incentives to encourage women-owned tiny and small businesses to grow faster. Appropriate personality development programs and skills training will aid their growth.

This study contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by providing real-life insights from women entrepreneurs from an emerging economy context, especially from Tamil Nadu, which has the highest number of women entrepreneurs in India.

Personality characteristics have a significant impact on the economic segment of women entrepreneurs. Due to gender biases or other factors, women entrepreneurs are fewer in India than in other countries. The purpose of this study is to identify the personality factors and challenges that affect their growth and success.

Logistic regression was used to show the impact of personality characteristics and firm performance and the moderating effect of challenges between personality characteristics and firm performance.

The findings revealed a significant impact of personality factors on firm performance, the absence of moderating effects of challenges and the presence of a mediation effect of enterprise age and enterprise location.

This research will help policymakers adopt policies and plans to reduce obstacles and challenges so that the economic conditions of women’s entrepreneurship can transform.

Women in the 21st century still live in a male-dominated patriarchal society because they face the problem of financial capital.

The results show the impact of personality traits and challenges on the firm performance of women’s entrepreneurship.

This paper aims to study the impediments and difficulties that prevent Indian women from becoming entrepreneurs.

Data were obtained through a survey involving 15 experts. Based on the feedback provided by the experts, ten relevant barriers in the context of Indian micro small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) were chosen. A structured questionnaire was used to gather data. These ten barriers create obstruction for Indian women as entrepreneurs. These barriers were ranked, and causal relationships among them established using interpretive structural modeling and Matrice d’Impacts croises-multiplication appliqúean classment (cross-impact matrix multiplication applied to classification) (ISM–MICMAC) approach.

This study identifies, on the basis of extant literature and experts’ opinion, ten barriers to female entrepreneurship. These barriers were ranked, and causal relationships among them established using the ISM–MICMAC approach. On the basis of ranking, women can move forward in MSMEs after removing these obstacles and it will have good results.

In this research, with literature reviews and experts opinion, ten barriers have been identified for women’s entrepreneurship and have been used to build the model.

To bring Indian women forward in the field of entrepreneurship, both the society and the government should work together, and efforts should be made to overcome the obstacles coming in the way of entrepreneurs.

Female entrepreneurship in India faces many problems including negative attitude of authorities and society toward women. The society and authorities have no format or model for Indian women to move forward in the entrepreneurship sector.

This study seeks to identify, on the basis of a thorough review of literature and expert opinion, major barriers to female entrepreneurship in the context of Indian MSMEs.