Purpose
We critically review the literature on women’s entrepreneurship in emerging economies. This is a thematic review to identify patterns and trends to better understand this literature. From our analysis, we offer ideas for useful and theoretically informed future work.
Design
We identify the nature, what is interesting, what it sees as important and consider what is neglected in this literature. Our analysis sought important issues, interesting directions and the potential for useful future work. Thematic analysis is ideal for messy and unstructured material such as the literature employed in this study as the data set. The process is qualitative, iterative and inductive but ontologically appropriate for the socially produced knowledge of the literature.
Findings
We found the literature tends towards descriptive papers. Few papers make substantial contributions to theory. Many papers reported the barriers women encounter, reporting general and typical processes of responding to obstacles and the implications for practice. Interestingly we perceived overcoming, and sometimes using, the cultural and physical restraints of gendered entrepreneurship. We propose the concept of restricted agency explain the gendering of entrepreneuring. Limited agency explains what they can do. Moreover, the concept helps explain why and what. Most promising theoretically, is how the application of this agency is slowly, and contextually differently changing the rules of the game.
Originality
We start out with the notion of the ‘otherness’ of women’s entrepreneurship. The literature is good at explaining both how and why women’s entrepreneurship is different and in effect, marginalised. We conceptualise this gendering process as restricted agency. We offer informed and relatively novel avenues for further research.