Women and Entrepreneurship in the Third World

Abstract

Research on the role of women in socio-economic change has received little attention from management scholars, especially the entrepreneurial behavior of women.  Most research has mainly focused on women in the developed and developing countries, yet, women in third world countries are largely ignored in entrepreneurship research.  There has recently been a growing interest as to why do women engage in entrepreneurial activities, and how some socio-economic factors may influence their entrepreneurial behaviors.  Combining the socio-economic factors with the extant literature on entrepreneurship is growingly an important issue, let alone the women in the third world countries.  In this paper, I focus on the entrepreneurial potential of women in third world countries, an issue that is often neglected in the entrepreneurship literature.  Specifically, I use the emancipation arguments to introduce a proposition that the need for independency and freedom will have stronger effects on triggering entrepreneurial behavior of third world countries’ women than their counterparts in advanced countries.  Furthermore, I argue that the less the political representation of women in these countries, the greater the likelihood for them to develop entrepreneurial intentions and behaviors.  Other socio-political arguments are considered, discussion and directions for future research follows.

Keywords: Liberation, political representation, entrepreneurial intentions.