By Albert N. Link, Department of Economics University of North Carolina at Greensboro, anlink@uncg.edu | Derek R. Strong, Department of Economics University of North Carolina at Greensboro, drstrong@uncg.edu
Entrepreneurship, from a gender perspective, is not only an academic topic of growing interest but also a topic of policy importance across many nations. In an effort to describe the scope of scholarly inquiry into this topic, we have constructed an annotated bibliography of 563 scholarly contributions covering the period 1979 to the present. These contributions were selected systematically, and they represent 16 different categories of research.
Gender and Entrepreneurship: An Annotated Bibliography contributes to scholarly thought about the nexus between gender and entrepreneurship by systematically searching an identifying the relevant literature on this topic. The authors begin with the oldest and most complete literature reviews in the literature and then consider those scholarly efforts in those reviews based on the criterion that each have 25 or more citations to date in Google Scholar. In addition, the authors examined all publications that referenced these earlier scholarly efforts and also identified the journals listed in these early reviews. To supplement this search process, two additional checks were imposed in an effort for completeness — a search of both the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) websites for reports on the topic of gender and entrepreneurship and any references previously not identified were included in the bibliography, which summarizes 563 scholarly contributions.
While there have been a number of excellent literature reviews in recent years published in various academic outlets, Gender and Entrepreneurship: An Annotated Bibliography is more complete than other efforts and places each contribution to the literature into one of 16 descriptive categories. This categorical taxonomy of the literature is subjective and is formulated based on key phrases published in either the abstract of a journal article, the article's statement of its purpose, or the article's summary.