A series of recommended reading lists provide starting points for researchers, students, practitioners, and others looking to dive deeper into research on gender and a wide variety of topics.

In this list, we take a closer look at the recommended reading on gender and entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurship is one of the key pathways of socioeconomic advancement and can be a driver of equality and economic growth for different social groups across economies in the global South and North. Research on gender and entrepreneurship has increased over the past two decades due to interest from development practitioners and academics. Below are 10 papers looking at conceptual, methodological and empirical insights on gender and entrepreneurship in developed and developing countries in the past decades.
Setting the scene for gender and entrepreneurship
#1

In “Gender and entrepreneurship: a review and process model”, Sullivan and Meek (2012) provide a nuanced understanding of gender and entrepreneurship using a micro-oriented process model. Their paper reviews literature from 1993 to 2010 on women’s choices about entrepreneurship based on motivation, ability to identify opportunities, resource acquisition and entrepreneurial success or performance at pre-launch, launch and post-launch levels. The authors point out that women’s motivation to pursue entrepreneurship is more diverse than men’s because their expectations are more multifaceted, with women highly valuing autonomy, independence, work-life balance and self-actualization. Women also rely more on friends or family and knowledge of previous work experience in identifying entrepreneurial opportunities compared to men. Women’s choice of lower-capital industries might not only be influenced by limited access to resources, but also the need to succeed. While internal motivations (desire to be their own boss) were stronger for women’s successful business launch, external motivations (identifying a market need) were stronger for men. Lastly, women view entrepreneurship as a means to achieve autonomy, independence and a more effective work- and family-life balance.
#2

Cardella et al. (2020), in “Women entrepreneurship: A systematic review to outline the boundaries of scientific literature”, advocate for the study of women and entrepreneurship as a construct on its own and not always in contrast to their men counterpart. The researchers recognized that women’s entrepreneurship is varied and rich in nuances. Women entrepreneurs are not a homogeneous group, so there is need to account for the heterogeneity of women entrepreneurs. Thus, an intersectional lens is needed when looking at women’s entrepreneurship. The authors also call for a rigorous mixed-method and feminist theoretical approach to analyze different nuances and peculiarities of women’s entrepreneurship. Lastly, there is a call for further studies on constraints women’s enterprises face at later stages of their business.
Novel methodological approaches to understanding gender and entrepreneurship
#3

In “Gender and entrepreneurship research: A review of methodological approaches”, Henry et al. (2016) argue that despite the shift toward feminist critiques of entrepreneurship, most literature still reports studies that only compare women and men, with little attention paid to gender constructs. In addition, there is an over-reliance on cross-sectional studies with small sample sizes often emphasizing women’s subordinate role. This paper insists that a shift in the conceptualization of gender and entrepreneurship should be matched with an appropriate shift in methodological approaches – mixed methods, especially qualitative research methods (in-depth interviews, life histories, case studies) and an explicitly feminist agenda. There is a need to question assumed constructions of gender and how it is performed.

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