Women Entrepreneurs in the New Indian Middle Class: Macro and Micro Perspectives (Collaboration Between IRMA and IHD)

Aims & Objectives: The objective of this project report was two-fold. The first objective was to highlight the mainstream entrepreneurship journals and explore the number of papers published on women entrepreneurship in these journals till date. The second objective of the paper was to review the growth of the field and present an analysis of the literature review papers published on women entrepreneurship till 2016.

Methodology: In order to analyse the leading research journals in the area of entrepreneurship with the main focus as women entrepreneurship, the research team considered e-databases like EBSCO, ProQuest and Google Scholar as the main source for articles. Following this, a second round of search was conducted for literature review articles published on women entrepreneurship in management and social science journals. In total, 19 relevant literature review articles were found on women entrepreneurship published from 1986 till May 2016.

Findings: In reviewing the literature, it was observed that initial studies on entrepreneurship primarily assumed male and female entrepreneurs to be the same and found no explicit need for a separate investigation. As a result, research on women entrepreneurship did not develop as a distinct domain until the late 1990s to early 2000s.

Recommendation: The project report suggested using the lens of feminist theories to capture heterogeneity in women entrepreneurship research and extend existing entrepreneurial theories. It further recommended the need to study entrepreneurial processes of women founded business models and adoption of innovativeness in research method choices. Moreover, much of the collaborations in the women entrepreneurship area are still restricted within national boundaries and there is a need to build research as well as practice networks across transnational borders.