Introduction: A New Look at Women’s Entrepreneurship Research (original) (raw)

Women entrepreneurs have been identified as the 'rising stars of the economies' (Vossenberg, 2013) and the 'way forward' (World Economic Forum, 2012). While women-owned businesses have increased in number, the underperformance of women-owned enterprises compared to the performance of their male-owned counterparts continues to be debated (Ahl, 2006; Eddleston and Powell, 2008; Marlow et al., 2008). The purpose of this book is to provide a fresh perspective on women's entrepreneurship and to co-create knowledge and expertise that can feed joint learning, innovative practices and evidence-based policy-making for the successful promotion of women's entrepreneurship and gender-just inclusive growth around the globe. Most previous research in entrepreneurship has evaluated the outcomes of an entrepreneurial activity in objective monetary terms, such as financial performance, wealth and job creation, and firm survival. This one-sided analysis limits the contribution of entrepreneurial activity that is initiated by disadvantaged and marginalized groups such as women, ethnic minorities, the disabled, and youth (Welter, 2011), even though these groups often create significant value beyond the purely financial. Such value takes multiple forms and occurs at various levels, so it must be documented if the full contribution that all entrepreneurs make to the economy and society is to be recognized (Sheikh et al., Chapter 2 this volume). The chapters in Part 1 of this book argue that, while women entrepreneurs are often labelled as underperformers in business for low growth and low success rates and are, therefore, under-recognized in the sphere of social value creation, these are criteria that society expects women to meet, and are not necessarily those that women expect or want to meet. Not all entrepreneurs are cut out for or aspire to the standards of high growth and performance as identified by the yardstick of male-owned and/or high-tech enterprises. Adopting a woman's perspective and using data collected from Ethiopia, Pakistan, the US, Spain and Morocco, the chapters in Part 1 argue that the performance and success of women-owned enterprises should be defined