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The objective of this article is to map and assess current evidence in women's technology entrepreneurship in business incubators with the aim of producing a conceptual framework that will allow us to understand how gender shapes the life of women technology entrepreneurs.

The authors conducted a systematic literature review. The data set comprises 49 publications, including peer-reviewed articles and prominent book chapters. These are first categorized according to their feminist approach and second analysed using an inductive thematic approach to map dominant concepts and research methods.

The authors develop a framework with four dimensions: (1) antecedents, (2) challenges, (3) outcomes and (4) solutions. The authors show that current literature mainly focuses on the challenges faced by women technology entrepreneurs in incubator settings. Although liberal feminist research is present, social feminist perspectives dominate, with poststructuralist research as a close second. Interestingly, current research has not focused much on individual characteristics; in other words, the baggage that women bring with them in terms of prior experiences is hardly investigated, even though there is general agreement that socialization shapes women's experiences of and responses to gender challenges.

The authors contribute to the literature in the following ways: The developed framework assists in understanding how gender is an overarching factor that shapes every facet of the life of a women technology entrepreneur, and how incubator environments intensify gender issues. Indeed, being in an incubator environment adds an extra layer of gendered conditions, thus intensifying the challenges that women meet, creating a “triple masculinity trap”. The review highlights that little is known about how early conditioning shapes women technology entrepreneurs' reactions to the gendered conditions they meet and that there is a lack of research on how women “do entrepreneurship”.

Muslim Indonesian women entrepreneurs (MIWEs) lie at the intersection of religion and gender. Given the growing participation of women in entrepreneurship and economic stability in Indonesia, the purpose of this study is to identify the factors (and their significance) influencing MIWEs’ business performance.

A survey of 101 MIWEs was conducted, and results were analyzed via structural modelling equation using SmartPLS 3.

The findings of this study suggest that, within the macro frame of the moderate version of Islam practiced and women’s economic engagement, women business owners’ skills and religious factors significantly influence their business performance. Factor analysis indicates that the role of the veil, Shariah guidance for business and managing stress through the practice of Salah (prayer) are important for MIWEs. However, this study also indicates that, in addition to religious factors, MIWEs’ own effective and participative leadership style, honesty and fairness reputation in business dealings and a good market image are also significant variables affecting business performance. This is in contrast to past studies, where the role of environmental factors such as access to capital, family and government has been shown to have a stronger influence on Muslim women entrepreneurs’ business performance.

Because of Indonesia’s unique pluralistic national context, along with increasing women’s economic participation, MIWEs emerge as a distinct category of entrepreneurs who integrate religion and their own skills to navigate their business performance.

The aim of this study is to better understand how black women utilize capital to frame their entrepreneurial identities in order to become legitimate and thus challenge institutional norms. To achieve this, the study draws on perspectives on legitimacy, identity and capital and focuses on the well-established wine industry in South Africa.

Using in-depth qualitative data from semi-structured interviews, this study delves into the lived experiences of nine black women entrepreneurs and three stakeholders in the South African wine industry. Such a context is unique because of the aspects of exclusion and segregation of black women. The data were supplemented with associated secondary material and were analysed using the constant comparative technique.

This study reveals dissonance, that is, a misfit, between black women's social identities and their entrepreneurial self-identities in the South African wine industry; the study uncovers that specific capital forms allow framing their identity through heroical self-description, exploiting professionalism and enacting new roles to alter the perception of what is socially legitimate in the wine industry.

This study contributes to understanding by highlighting that black women entrepreneurs in the wine industry rebel against the expectation that they must fit into a predetermined role. The study highlights the relevance of legitimacy, identity and capital theoretical perspectives to study an underexplored context and unpack how black women challenge the barriers that affect their entrepreneurial identities in their quest to become legitimate. The value of this study revolves around revealing the underexplored connection between entrepreneurial identity and legitimacy through actions taken by black women entrepreneurs when reworking the role(s) tied to their social identities. The findings suggest the importance of capital, particularly cultural capital, in how black women entrepreneurs become legitimate in the wine industry. Avenues for further research are offered.

Family entrepreneurship benefits women because of their economic, family, and social needs. But, as rural women, it is not much easy for them to maintain their family entrepreneurship successfully. Thus, this paper aims to explore the main challenges faced by rural women entrepreneurs in Bangladesh to survive their family entrepreneurship.

This study is qualitative in nature, based on narrative inquiry. The purposive sampling technique was used as a part of a non-probability sampling method to collect the data from rural women entrepreneurs from three districts (Khulna, Shatkhira, and Sylhet) in Bangladesh engaged in family entrepreneurship. No new information was found after collecting the data from seven (07) respondents; thus, they were chosen as the final sample size.

The findings show that rural women entrepreneurs faced primarily social and cultural, financial, and skill-related challenges, though they face other challenges to survive their family entrepreneurship. The attitude and perception of society toward women and their roles are at the root of social and cultural barriers. Researchers also found that financial challenges have a colossal impact on rural women and the other problem.

Although entrepreneurial activities are essential for socio-economic development in these developing countries, this research adds to the existing information by highlighting the main challenges that rural women face when they want to be business owners and entrepreneurs.

Research on rural women entrepreneurship in Bangladesh is limited and new. This study can provide an overview of the challenges faced by the rural women entrepreneurs and provide them with a blueprint for the development of women entrepreneurs in developing countries.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the learning effects of entrepreneurial failure (EF) among micro-women entrepreneurship in Accra.

Using a qualitative research method, purposive sampling was used to identify 64 micro-women entrepreneurs, and data was collected using interviews.

Linked to the experiential learning theory, the study found that consequences of EF provide an entrepreneurial learning platform that influences micro-women entrepreneurs to acquire new skills and knowledge for their entrepreneurial development, incurred costs that negatively affect operations, acquired no knowledge or take a decision to opt-out of entrepreneurship as a carrier.

The study was based on a relatively small sample size of 64 participants which made it difficult to generalize the findings despite the benefits of the research methods adopted in the study.

The study contributed to the EF literature with micro-women entrepreneurs in an African context. It highlights the possible additional learning consequences of EF which are being scared of entrepreneurial venturing as a result of their failure. This negatively impacts the desire to engage in entrepreneurship as a future career. The identification of irrelevant learning consequences of EF, suggests that the existing experiential learning theory may need to be revised to further enhance its applicability in micro-women entrepreneurship in different cultural contexts, as not all experiences result in learning.

As families engage in entrepreneurship, particularly in developing economies, women's engagement in such activities is subject to the traditional cultures, norms and values of the communities to which they belong. This paper aims to investigate how the socio-cultural context influences women's entrepreneurship as women engage in “family entrepreneuring”.

The study draws on an inductive qualitative approach to explore how multiple cultural, social and economic contexts encourage women's entrepreneurship and, thus, position them at the centre of family entrepreneuring within this community. Using snowballing techniques, we analyse narratives from 51 women entrepreneurs, generated through semi-structured interviews, to reveal key insights into the practice of family entrepreneuring.

The findings reveal the complex socio-cultural context within the “Adja” community, where polygamy, a traditional and cultural practice, enables the transfer of culturally and socially embedded informal knowledge. The study explains how women's entrepreneuring activities are supported by informal in-family apprenticeships, resulting in family members learning specific skills while also experiencing the feeling of belonging to the family. Showcasing the heterogeneity of contexts, particularly those found in Africa, this study challenges the normative view within the Global North and the dominance of the “heroic male” in entrepreneurship by showcasing how women (especially matriarchs) are significant actors in training other women, co-wives, daughters and relatives in family entrepreneuring.

Thus, this study contributes to the extant literature on family entrepreneuring by revealing an unusual case of women from polygamous families becoming the focal actors in family entrepreneuring activity and challenging the culturally ascribed gender roles to evolve into the breadwinners in their households, as well as focusing on how this process is driven by endogenous knowledge exchange.

This study aims to provide a better understanding of the individual-level factors that affect rural women’s sustainable entrepreneurial intention in starting and running a business in Bangladesh and contributing to national economic growth.

Data from a sample of 297 rural Bangladeshi women were analysed using a quantitative approach with Smart PLS 3.0 (SEM) and SPSS V25. This was to explore the direct influence of perceived capability, social perception and individual competencies on women’s intention to become sustainable entrepreneurs. The indirect consequences of these three variables on perceived opportunity were also evaluated.

The studies confirmed a positive and significant association between perceived capability and social perception with the intention to become a sustainable entrepreneur. There is no conventional connection between women’s individual competencies and their intention to become an entrepreneur. Moreover, the data confirmed that perceived opportunity mediates the relationship between perceived capability and individual competencies with the intention to become an entrepreneur. However, no mediation role of perceived opportunity in the relationship between social perception and intention was found.

This study is one of very few to explore through empirical analysis the relationship between women’s individual characteristics and their intention to become sustainable entrepreneurs and to investigate whether rural women are motivated to become empowered to contribute to economic development through sustainable entrepreneurial intention.

This study investigates the antecedents of women entrepreneurs’ performance in an emerging economy. Based on the review of extant literature, six antecedents of women entrepreneurs’ performance, namely, motivation, networking, socio-cultural, business environment, training and development, and financials were proposed and subsequently empirically examined.

Gaps in the literature were identified, based on which the theoretical background of the study was formulated. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) were applied to confirm the factor-item structure. The impact of explanatory variables was investigated using the structural equation modeling (SEM) based path analysis.

The study concludes that motivation, networking, socio-cultural, business environment, training and development, and financials have a significant positive influence on the performance of the women entrepreneurs.

There is a dearth of quality research that holistically investigates the key antecedents of performance among women entrepreneurs. Most existing studies have not considered the possible antecedents of performance concomitantly. Additionally, the relationships have been measured individually rather than at the construct level. Further, a majority of the existing studies investigating the performance of women entrepreneurs have been confined to settings within developed countries. By providing insight into the antecedents of women entrepreneurs’ performance elsewhere, the present study attempts to bridge these identified gaps. This study is expected to advance the knowledge about the factors influencing the performance of women entrepreneurs in emerging economies such as India. These insights will likely be valuable when creating policies related to this crucial aspect of economic development.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how female entrepreneurs navigate complex and challenging institutional environments. It draws on institutional theory and the concept of response strategies to institutional pressures to explore the institutional barriers that female entrepreneurs encounter and highlights the strategies women employ to overcome them.

This paper builds on a case study of female entrepreneurs engaged in food processing in Tanzania. It draws on semi-structured interviews with nine female entrepreneurs, one focus group discussion with six female entrepreneurs and two semi-structured interviews with representatives from women’s business associations (WBAs).

This paper reveals a repertoire of active strategies enacted by women entrepreneurs, including advocacy through WBAs, bootstrapping, semi-informal operations, co-location of home and business, spouse involvement in the business, downplay of gender identity, reliance on persistence and passion and networking through WBAs. While these strategies involve various degrees of agency, the findings indicate that collective efforts through WBAs offer women the most promise in terms of influencing institutional structures.

While there is a growing body of literature examining how institutions influence female entrepreneurs, there is a dearth of knowledge on how women experience institutional complexities and actively react to institutional barriers, complexities and contradictions. This paper shows the value of analytical attention to female entrepreneurs’ agency by highlighting women’s active responses and documenting a repertoire of strategies.

As of 2007, there were an estimated 10.4 million businesses in the United States that were owned and operated by women. The number of women-owned firms has continued to grow at around twice the rate of all firms for the past two decades (Center for Women℉s Business Research, 2008). On the other hand, women comprise only 15.4 percent of corporate officers in Fortune 500 companies (Catalyst, 2007b) and, in 2003, held only 14.8 percent of board seats in the Fortune 500 (Catalyst, 2007a).To better understand the glass ceiling faced by both female entrepreneurs and women leaders, the research on women℉s issues is examined from a number of different vantage points. Women℉s entrepreneurship and women℉s leadership research on leadership, decision-making, and gender differences was examined to discover commonalities. Then female single-sex education literature was reviewed for insights on developmental issues that might influence future women entrepreneurs and leaders. In this exploration of research, it was found that both women entrepreneurs and women leaders in the corporate environment tend toward the same leadership styles and ways of interacting with others; they also experience a lack of role models and possible lack of self-efficacy.The literature on single-sex education provides observations that young women may thrive in environments in which there are fewer male competitors, hold less stereotyped views on gender, hold higher aspirations, may have greater opportunities for training of leadership skills, and may have increased self-confidence that may be the result of exposure to successful women role models. Implications for future research are explored and suggestions are provided to meet the needs of developing women entrepreneurs.