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The purpose of this qualitative study is to explore how highly educated women respond to career chance events in a Korean context where traditional cultural values and male-dominated organizational culture coexist.

The authors conducted 50 semi-structured interviews with highly educated women operationalized as women with doctoral degrees in and out of Korea. The authors used a collaborative research process with a team of ten Korean-born researchers who have built consensus on research themes through discussions on the collection and analysis of a large data set, thus reducing the researcher bias issue inherent in qualitative research.

In an analysis of the interview data collected, the authors report on three themes: before obtaining a doctoral degree, during and after their doctoral study and responses (coping strategies) to chance events in their careers. Highly educated women’s pursuing a doctoral degree was a way to maintain work–life balance in Korea where women are expected to take a primary caregiver role. After obtaining a doctoral degree, participants struggled with limited job opportunities in the male-dominated higher education. Women’s unplanned and unexpected chance events are intertwined with the male-dominated culture in Korea, and career interruptions as such a chance event, whether voluntary or involuntary, happened largely due to family reasons. In this context, highly educated women responded to chance events largely at individual and family levels and articulated the need for support at organizational and government levels.

The study findings confirm the literature that women’s careers are limited by traditional family roles in non-Western countries where strong patriarchal culture is prevalent. Particularly, women’s career interruptions surfaced as a critical chance event that either disrupts or delays their careers largely because of family issues. Future research is called for to identify both individual and contextual factors that influence women’s decisions on voluntary and involuntary career interruptions as their responses to chance events.

Based on highly educated women’s coping strategies largely at individual and family levels, we suggest national human resource development policies put in place not to lose out on the opportunity to develop highly educated women with doctoral degrees as a quality workforce for a nation’s sustainable economic growth. Additionally, organizations need to be aligned with the government policies and programs for the provision of developmental programs for women in the workplace, beginning with highly educated women’s career planning, while creating organizational culture to promote gender equality as a long-term goal.

The participants’ voluntary career breaks helped them care for their children, be involved in their children’s education, reflect on work–life balance after having long hours of work for many years and move forward with personal satisfaction. Voluntary career breaks can be understood as highly educated women’s unique way of responding to chance events.

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.

This paper seeks to add a historical perspective to the contemporary debate concerning women’s entrepreneurship in India. This study aims to explore the quantitative and qualitative research map of the research field of women’s entrepreneurship. Through this exploration, the authors aim to portray the historical and contemporary factors related to women’s entrepreneurship development in India, the problems and the opportunities. Future research opportunities are also identified based on the keyword analysis.

The study uses a systematic literature review to analyze the historical and theoretical perspectives of women’s entrepreneurship in India. The bibliometric analysis portrays the publication landscape, including the most popular journals, authors and countries, citation analysis and keyword analysis. The content analysis reveals the thematic clusters of the research field.

The content analysis of the management literature on women’s entrepreneurship reveals four primary clusters from the research: contextual embeddedness in women’s entrepreneurship, reasons for starting a business, microfinance interventions and empowerment of women entrepreneurs and marginalization dynamics for women entrepreneurs in India’s informal sector. The study also presents implications for policymakers and a women entrepreneurs’ development framework.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this study is the first to comprehensively analyze the management literature on women’s entrepreneurship in India from a historical perspective. The study combines bibliometric mapping and content analysis for a holistic presentation of the research field of women’s entrepreneurship in India and future research opportunities.

Women's empowerment is a crucial gender issue and more so in developing countries. Women's empowerment has far-reaching consequences at individual, household, societal and global levels. In this study, the authors focus on the effect of their childhood and pre-marriage conditions on the present level of empowerment in the rural setting in the southern part of India controlling for relevant variables.

This study is based on the primary data collected from 700 women in southern India's villages. The authors used chi-square to understand the bivariate association between the level of women's empowerment and their socio-economic characteristics including their pre-marriage conditions. Further, multiple regression was used to find out the association between her pre-marriage characteristics and empowerment.

The study finds a positive association between mothers' education on their daughters' empowerment. Freedom of movement during childhood also had a positive relationship with the current level of empowerment. The study finds a positive effect of self-esteem and self-efficacy on women's empowerment. The authors also found that property in their names and knowledge about their legal rights were associated with higher empowerment. Other important indicators related to higher women's empowerment are household assets and their employment.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this study is a unique attempt to study the effect of conditions before marriage on women's empowerment, especially in the Indian context. The study looks into the relationship between childhood conditions of women in a rural set up including their parents' education and jobs, discrimination faced and upbringing conditions and their current level of empowerment.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-05-2022-0329

In recent years, the topic of women's entrepreneurship has gained increasing attention from researchers and policymakers. Its role in economic growth and development has been widely recognized in several studies. However, the relationship between gender in entrepreneurship and innovation is an underexplored aspect in particular at a country-level perspective. This paper aims to answer the following question: Does female entrepreneurship impact innovation at a national level?

Using a panel dataset of 35 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member countries over the period 2002–2019, the authors carried out a comprehensive econometric analysis, based on the fixed-effect model, the random-effect model and the feasible generalized least squares estimator, as well as a battery of tests to prevent problems of multicollinearity, heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation of the error terms. In doing so, the authors found consistent and robust results on the linear and nonlinear relationship between women's entrepreneurship and innovation, using selected country indicators from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) consortium, the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) and the World Development Indicators (WDI), including female self-employment, female nascent entrepreneurship and R&D investment and controlling for the same relationships in the case of men's entrepreneurship.

This study shows that the level of R&D investment, which according to the literature can be considered as a proxy of innovation, is higher when the level of women's entrepreneurship is low. However, exploring more in depth this relationship and the relationship between male entrepreneurship and innovation, the authors found two important and new results. The first one involves the different impact on R&D investment of female self-employment and female nascent entrepreneurship. In particular, female self-employment appears to have a linear negative impact on the R&D, while the impact of female nascent entrepreneurship is statistically nonsignificant. The second one affects the nonlinearity of the negative effect, suggesting that very different challenges are possible at different levels of women's entrepreneurship. In addition, analyzing the role of human capital in the relationship between R&D investment and women entrepreneurship, it emerges that higher education (as the main component of human capital) makes early-stage women's entrepreneurship more technologically consuming, which promotes R&D investment. A higher level of education lessens the significance of the negative relationship between the simplest type of women entrepreneurship (female self-employment) and R&D investment.

The originality of the study is that it provides new evidence regarding the link between women's entrepreneurship and innovation at the macro level, with a specific focus on self-employed women entrepreneurs and early-stage women entrepreneurship. In this sense, to the best of the authors' knowledge, this study is among the few showing a nonlinear relationship between women's entrepreneurship and country-level innovation and a negative impact only in the case of female self-employment. Moreover, this study has relevant implications from a policymaking perspective, in terms of promoting more productive women's entrepreneurship.

This article examines the dominant research topics that guide the literature on women's entrepreneurship in family businesses.

The authors used performance and scientific network mapping analyses from bibliometric techniques. Performance analysis was used to identify the most influential journals, authors, countries, co-citation, multidimensional scaling (MDS), hierarchical cluster (HCA) and document analysis to identify dominant research themes.

The research results show that studies on women's entrepreneurship in family businesses are gathered in three clusters. The studies in the first cluster focused on family succession and women's roles. The themes of the succession process, gender bias, leadership and entrepreneurship in the second cluster are intense. Finally, in the third cluster, the themes of women leaders and identity construction dominate.

First, new conceptualizations of female entrepreneurship from family businesses emerge over time (example: “fementerpreneur”); accepting and using these words takes time. For this reason, the authors may have missed the newly emerged concepts in the field of family businesses in the search strategy. Second, although MDS results are widely used in bibliometric research, other forms of MDS analysis may reveal different groups and clusters. Finally, bibliometric analysis is based more on retrospective and dominant themes in the most cited articles, with a heavy emphasis on the most cited papers. Hence, new articles and contributions can be equally important.

Previous studies have not examined the subject of women's entrepreneurship in family businesses. By addressing this issue and setting the agenda for future research, the authors contribute to the literature on women's entrepreneurship in family businesses.

This paper aims to explore the crucial role of socio-cultural factors in the entrepreneurial experiences of women in the Gulf region.

A focused qualitative systematic analysis of 65 published articles was conducted to present existing approaches to studying women's entrepreneurship in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and identify the key socio-cultural factors impacting women's entrepreneurial realities.

It was found that gender roles, family influence, social networking and religion are among the most significant factors influencing the entrepreneurial experiences of women in the GCC.

It was found that the region's prevalent social norms, vis-à-vis how gender roles are defined and practiced, greatly influence the lived experiences of women entrepreneurs. The role of family support (or lack thereof) and the access to networking opportunities to start and grow ventures significantly affect women's entrepreneurial successes. The findings also point to the overarching ideological and practical guidance, Islam is believed to offer, on how life in general and businesses, in particular, should be conducted.

The paper contributes to the burgeoning literature on women's entrepreneurship in the Gulf by promoting context-dependent knowledge. In particular, the findings highlight the importance of critical and nuanced evaluation of existing theories of gender and entrepreneurship. The examination can help policymakers develop more effective and inclusive entrepreneurship policies in the region.

Violence continues to escalate globally, despite efforts that are being made to curb it. Even though men constitute the majority of the perpetrators of violence, it is indisputable that some of the violence is also perpetrated by women. Qualitative in nature, this chapter is located within the interpretive research approach. Arguments made in this chapter are grounded in a socialist feminism approach, which foregrounds the importance of class and gender. Thus, this chapter drew from desk review and an empirical study conducted in Lesotho, utilising the Female Correctional Institution in Lesotho as the study site. The chapter explores women's perpetration of varied forms of violence. It aims at shedding more light on the drivers of violence perpetrated by women. The study unearthed that women's violence is mainly driven by poverty, gender inequalities, lack of social capital and self-defence. The author argues that future theoretical engagements and policy responses to women's violence could benefit from empirical evidence, which critically engages feminist approaches. The chapter is envisaged to contribute to the current debates on feminist approaches to women's violence.

This study aims to examine why women transition from wage work to self-employed entrepreneurship, the seemingly insecure and unruly economic sector compared with the stable iron rice bowl and the fancy spring rice jobs.

Based on in-depth interviews in Zhejiang, the entrepreneurial hotbed in coastal China, this study examines the experiences of self-employed female entrepreneurs who used to work in the iron rice bowl and the spring rice jobs and explores their nonconventional career transition and its gendered implications.

This study finds that these women quit their previous jobs to escape from gendered suppression in wage work where their femininity was stereotyped, devalued or disciplined. By working for themselves, these women embrace a rubber rice bowl that allows them to improvise different forms of femininity that are better rewarded and recognized.

The study contributes to studies on gender and work by framing femininity as a fluid rather than a fixed set of qualities and fills the research gap by illustrating women’s agency in reacting to gender expectations in certain workplaces. The study develops a new concept of rubber rice bowl to describe how entrepreneurship, a seemingly women-unfriendly sphere, attracts women by allowing them to comply with, resist, or improvise normative gender expectations.

The starting premise of this study is that women's empowerment is the goal for self-realization and that the support that comes from local tourism stakeholders represents an adequate base. In many rural areas, women have established self-help groups (SHGs), which facilitate the interaction with a wide range of stakeholders. The objective of this paper is to investigate the effects of SHGs on female entrepreneurship and self-employment in tourism.

To examine the research question, this study adopted a quantitative research that included a sample of 513 women in a less-advanced rural area in Serbia. For the data analysis, the generalized linear regression model (GLM) was used.

According to the results, self-employment is the leading goal of women's empowerment.

The main limitation in the research and the authors’ suggestion for future research is to increase the sample size of female respondents, so examination of their attitudes and role in the travel business in their local settings might reach higher significance. The second issue that the authors would like to point out is a highly local character of our study, so the future research should involve other rural areas in the country and from abroad (e.g. similar undeveloped countryside with noticeable, active women's role in local entrepreneurship).

The most important practical implications of this paper are twofold: (1) the results of the research have shown that the tourist potential of rural areas can be enhanced through local tourism stakeholders' support; (2) women without professional interest or jobs in rural areas, especially in the areas where the population is traditionally dominated by men (husband/brother/father), have a chance to earn and to be economically more independent. This research can affect future studies to investigate other aspects of empowerment depending on the difference of regions, from one side, and also alternative opportunities for tourism and local development in less-advanced rural areas, from another side.

The study analyzes the tourism potential of the rural areas (which are less advanced and mostly very poor in developing countries, such as Serbia). In this case, there are opportunities to increase employment, social inclusion of women, development of new tourism strategies, implementation of destination marketing, etc. Moreover, it contributes to future research in the field of stakeholders in tourism strategies.