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This reflective paper offers an overview on how refugee women's entrepreneurship scholarship evolved, and suggests research directions for the future development of the field.

A reflective approach encompassing the evolvement of the field of refugee women's entrepreneurship research.

Whilst refugee women's entrepreneurship scholarship and research, and its interlinks with resilience, empowerment, gender, and livelihoods theoretical framings have flourished in recent years, it remains a relatively young scholarship area, evolving from a broad social science multi-disciplinary base including refugee studies, economics, and development, rather than mainstream business disciplines.

Refugee women's entrepreneurship offers a novel approach and contribution to the broader and established gender and entrepreneurship field. Nevertheless, critical research questions and gaps remain within the growing refugee women's entrepreneurship scholarship regarding the potential of entrepreneuring to empower refugee women socially, economically, and politically.

To date, little research has been focused on the nature and dynamics of female entrepreneurial networking activity. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to examine how gender and culture affect business creation, how women perceive social capital, and how important their personal networks are for their businesses, especially in the context of patriarchal societies.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with women entrepreneurs living and operating businesses in Turkey and in four countries of the Middle East and North African region, namely, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Egypt.

The results indicate that being a woman entrepreneur in a highly patriarchal society limits entrepreneurial activities due to culture and social norms. However, networking appears as the key factor for these women entrepreneurs to overcome the barriers that they face, such as access to capital, financial information, resources, and new business opportunities.

This study has limitations that tend to be commonly found in exploratory studies, so you cannot make generalizations. However, the findings lay the groundwork for future studies to examine the role of networking activity in female entrepreneurship in the context of patriarchal societies.

The findings are helpful for policymakers and other social groups interested in improving the conditions for female entrepreneurship. Governments and other economic actors need to provide training in both management and networking skills, encourage local businesses and associations to provide their venues for networking opportunities, and also provide support to women business organizations.

Women’s entrepreneurship is growing, but still there is a scarcity of scholarly literature on the women entrepreneurs and their entrepreneurial activity.

This research provides empirical evidence of the nature and dynamics of female entrepreneurial networking activity in the context of patriarchal societies.

This editorial aims to investigate the interface between gendered processes and family business by exploring the extent to which gendered processes are reinforced (or not) in family business operations and dynamics. This approach will complement the agency and resource-based view theoretical bases that dominate family business research (Chrisman et al., 2009) and further contribute to extending gender theories.

Acknowledging that gender is socially constructed, this editorial discusses the interface between gendered processes and family business within entrepreneurship research.

Despite a growing interest in gender and family business, there is limited literature that explores gender theory within family business research. A gender theory approach embracing family business research contributes to a needed theoretical deconstruction of existing perspectives on the operations, sustainability and succession of family businesses in the twenty-first century.

This editorial makes a contribution to extant scholarship by extending gender theories through an exploration of the gendered processes in family business research.

Purpose – To prepare for the increasingly important role women entrepreneurs are expected to play in the knowledge economy, it is imperative to understand, facilitate and manage women's training needs for full participation in the knowledge economy. The chapter introduces a skilling framework which integrates pedagogical, organisational and technological values to promote the uptake of knowledge economy skills.

Design/methodology/approach – An exploratory study approach was adopted underpinned by a social constructionist epistemology. The study fused a literature review on knowledge economy skills and women's learning needs with a desktop audit of opportunities available to women entrepreneurs to augment their knowledge economy skills.

Findings – Based on the two sets of data, the study found that a lack of attention has been paid to increasing female entrepreneurs' opportunities to develop to their full potential in the knowledge economy. Most training programmes fall short in delivering comprehensive digital and strategic skills required for women entrepreneurs' full participation in a knowledge society.

Research limitations/implications: Given the exploratory study approach, researchers are encouraged to adopt and test the proposed framework.

Practical implications – The interlinking of business and technology offers unique opportunities for women to engage in entrepreneurship and innovation. For policy makers this analysis provides insights on how to foster female entrepreneurship in the knowledge economy. For educators it provides a teaching and learning framework that encompasses evidence based content, gender-sensitive approaches to business skilling and collaborative learning environments.

Originality/Value of chapter – This framework helps lay a foundation for future research on the skilling of heterogeneous women entrepreneurs in the knowledge economy.

The assumption of wealth creation as the dominant motive underlying entrepreneurial efforts has been challenged in recent work on entrepreneurship. Taking the perspective that entrepreneurship involves emancipatory efforts by social actors to escape ideological and material constraints in their environments (Rindova, Barry, & Ketchen, 2009), researchers have sought to explain a range of entrepreneurial activities in contexts that have traditionally been excluded from entrepreneurship research. We seek to extend this research by proposing that entrepreneurial acts toward emancipation can be guided by different notions of the common good underlying varying conceptions of worth, beyond those emphasized in the view of entrepreneurial activity as driven by economic wealth creation. These alternative conceptions of worth are associated with specific subjectivities of entrepreneurial self and relevant others, and distinct legitimate bases for actions and coordination, enabling emancipation by operating from alternative value system perspectives. Drawing on Boltanski and Thévenot’s (2006) work on multiple orders of worth (OOWs), we describe how emancipatory entrepreneurship is framed within – and limited by – the dominant view, which is rooted in a market OOW. As alternatives to this view, we theorize how the civic and inspired OOWs point to alternate emancipatory ends and means through which entrepreneurs break free from material and ideological constraints. We describe factors that enable and constrain emancipatory entrepreneurship efforts within each of these OOWs, and discuss the implications of our theoretical ideas for how entrepreneurs can choose among different OOWs as perspectives and for the competencies required for engaging with pluralistic value perspectives.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the challenges female entrepreneurs face in the development of their business in the context of Nigeria. In so doing, it addresses a gap in the literature on the experiences of female entrepreneurs in a non‐Western context and acknowledges the contribution that women make in this area of work.

The paper draws on survey data from 274 female entrepreneurs currently engaged in their businesses in three states – Lagos (Nigeria's largest city), Ogun and Oyo within the South West of Nigeria.

Results indicate that female entrepreneurs are generally confident and resourceful and that they enjoy the challenge of entrepreneurial activity. As in the West, they experience difficulties relating to family commitments and access to finance – as well as problems gaining acceptance and accessing networks.

It is argued that cultural values specific to the situation mean that these challenges, while common to female entrepreneurs in other national contexts, “play out” differentially and that they are experienced with different levels of depth and “intensity”. It is also argued that future research might uncover at a deeper level and drawing on qualitative methodology how some of the factors identified are experienced in women's day‐to‐day lives. The paper suggests some policy implications in the form of support for female entrepreneurs in this context.

The purpose of this paper is to test whether Australian female and male entrepreneurs differ in their growth aspirations and demand for finance; denial, discouragement and financial constraint rates; and sources of finance.

This paper applies logistic regression techniques to data drawn from a comprehensive survey of Australian small‐ and medium‐sized businesses, which was conducted in 2010.

After controlling for a wide range of firm, owner and risk characteristics, female entrepreneurs are found to have lower growth aspirations than males but do not differ in their demand for business finance. Gender does not influence the probability of reporting denial, discouragement or financial constraint. Females and males do not differ significantly in the types of finance that they use.

The online survey had a low response rate.

First, the paper tests the proposition that gender mediates demand for finance whilst controlling for a wide range of firm, owner and risk variables. Second, the paper tests whether female entrepreneurs are more likely than males to be financially constrained, that is, to have foregone viable investment opportunities due to inadequate access to finance. In doing so, it endeavours to reconcile the financial discrimination and financial constraint literatures. Third, the paper tests whether gender produces its effects in interaction with owners' migration status.