A Systematic Literature Review on Female Entrepreneurship and an Agenda for the Future

Female entrepreneurship is a crucial phenomenon in entrepreneurship and management research. However, the field suffers from fragmentation, leaving fundamental questions unanswered. Prior research lacks consensus whether and why female entrepreneurs differ from their male counterparts, posing obstacles to the further development of the field. Given the field’s rapid evolution over the past 13 years and the absence of a state-of-the-art systematic literature review (SLR), this SLR aims at clarifying which factors explain wherein female entrepreneurs differ from male entrepreneurs along the entrepreneurial process. For this purpose, we conducted a SLR of 331 articles, covering the last 38 years of research, and inductively generated 21 thematic areas from our qualitative content analysis. We identified the primary drivers and barriers of female entrepreneurship and present a research model along four stages of the entrepreneurial process. For each stage, we address the most fundamental questions and contribute to the fields’ development by providing a cohesive overview of prior research and directions for future research. This SLR discusses opportunities of pursuing cross-disciplinary research, helps to overcome limitations of current research, and aims at expanding existing theories within the female entrepreneurship field. Political implications for gender-related directions of societally gender inequality discourses are discussed.