Female Entrepreneurship Research: A Classification of Results

In 2010 187 million out of 400 million entrepreneurs were women in the world (GEM, 2012); this number grew so rapidly by the end of the eighties that Brush and Cooper (2012) define female-owned businesses as one of the fastest growing entrepreneurial populations in the world. Due to the relevance of the phenomenon for economic progress, the Authors settled on a multiyear collaborative study in order to deepen the main features of female entrepreneurship, with a specific interest in the Italian context. This work represents its initial outcome. The goal of this work is to present a classification scheme for female entrepreneurship research, covering 191 articles published between 2000 and 2012 in both business & management and sociological journals. Results show that the interest of academic literature in female entrepreneurship increases on average from 2006 and that both developed and developing countries different from US and Anglo-Saxon ones have appeared in international journals in recent years, thus contributing to enrich the debate on the topic.