Female Entrepreneurship, Institutional Support and Accomplishments: A Review

The issue of women's entrepreneurship and leadership is constantly spotlighted in a lopsided fashion. They have dealt with an image not actually shaped by them. This shaping, buoyed by decades-old media-driven subtle stereotypes, is chipped away by each female-led business that launches, grows, and accelerates. With changing narratives, collaborative efforts, conscious adaptations, and institutional support, the word ‘gender’ has taken a back seat in business conversations of the future. The number of women owning their own businesses has increased globally, but there are still several obstacles, including lack of finance, rigid societal expectations, time limits, and skill deficiencies. However, the gender narrative is typically getting changed by women addressing their needs and crafting business sense out of it. Research from World Bank and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) demonstrates that if equally large investments are made in male- and female-owned businesses, the world economy could increase from $2.5 trillion to $5 trillion. A slew of collective efforts, such as the World Bank's Female Entrepreneurship Resource Point, International Labour Organisation's Women Entrepreneurship Development Programs, Women Entrepreneurship Finance Initiative (We-Fi), etc., seek to address the financial and non-financial constraints faced by women at a multi-lateral front. Meanwhile, state governments are also making efforts to reduce disparity and bring women to par with their men counterparts in their entrepreneurial capacities. Along the same lines, this paper deals with traditional and contemporary challenges and opportunities women entrepreneurs face and their participation in social, cultural, and economic arenas. In this paper, secondary data from various papers, reports, news articles and websites have been abstracted to create a review.