Systematic Literature Review on Female Entrepreneurship: Citation and Thematic Analysis

Abstract

This paper carries out a systematic review of the literature on female entrepreneurship. A total of 192 articles focusing on female entrepreneurship, published between 2000 and 2019 have been analysed. The purpose of this paper is to give a current knowledge of the sub-areas in female entrepreneurship research by focusing on two aspects. First, it reviews research papers by using citation analysis to identify and categorize the main areas of female entrepreneurship presently interesting the attention of the research community. Second, a thematic analysis is done to explore the precise themes being researched. Regardless of many of publications and their variety, the present study reveals six different themes. Defining female entrepreneurship is problematic, entrepreneurship is gender specific, from hard issues to soft issues, family is the main responsibility, female entrepreneurs are underperformers and networking is unique for women were found as main themes. A number of research gaps are found out, in order to persuade new avenues and angles in the female entrepreneurship field of research that may be fruitful in filling these gaps.