Women’s e-entrepreneurship: a typology-based synthesis of drivers and challenges

Purpose This study aims to synthesize fragmented literature on women’s e-entrepreneurship and categorize the major factors affecting women’s e-entrepreneurial intention into two broader typologies, i.e., drivers and challenges. Furthermore, this study proposes an integrated conceptual framework based on popularly studied antecedents and challenges of women’s e-entrepreneurship and novel future research directions. Design/Methodology This study adopted typology-based review to synthesize 64 relevant papers on women e-entrepreneurship published during the past 25 years. Findings This synthesis reveals that there are four major types of drivers facilitating women e-entrepreneurship, i.e., need-based drivers, psychographic drivers, environmental/facilitating drivers, and socio-demographic drivers. However, there are four major challenges inhibiting women e-entrepreneurship, i.e., social barriers, resource inaccessibility barriers, technological barriers, and business environment barriers. Furthermore, the findings indicate that there is less research on this domain in developed countries as majority of the existing research is based in emerging nations and is quantitative in nature. Practical implications Theoretically, this paper enriches the women e-entrepreneurship literature by providing a synthesis of extant literature and insightful future research directions. Practically, the findings provide insightful guidelines for various stakeholders to support and promote women e-entrepreneurship. Originality This study is the first attempt to categorize the widely fragmented antecedents in the women e-entrepreneurship literature using typology-based structure and propose an integrated conceptual framework based on widely studied drivers and challenges of women e-entrepreneurship.