Female entrepreneurship: a Navigation of the Field and Ways Forward

The paper presents the results of a bibliometric study on the literature on female entrepreneurship over a period of 32 years, from 1986 to 2017, inclusive. We set out to map the evolution of the field in the past 32 years, to identify the contributors to female entrepreneurship research in terms of the authors, their institutional affiliation at the time of contribution, and sex and to explore the outlets through which female entrepreneurship research articles have been published. The analysis revealed that scholars over the years have unearthed the remarkable differences that exist between male and female-owned ventures, stemming from the different family contexts and environment dictates that men and women entrepreneurs find themselves. The study shows that the opportunity identification and subsequent exploitation (market); the acquisition of financial resources (money) and the management styles, strategies, performance and growth (management) of female entrepreneurs, unlike those of their male counterparts are strongly mediated. This mediation could either be coming from their family contexts (motherhood) or the exigencies of the environments in which they find themselves (meso/macro environment).