A Comparative Analysis of the Status of Women Entrepreneurship: India Vs. Global

The purpose of this paper is to offer an understanding on factors affecting women entrepreneurship, their share and participation rate and suggest policy issues and interventions required both at society and government level to promote women entrepreneurship. The importance of women as a largely untapped pool of entrepreneurs has been widely recognized by economic development agencies. However, despite a number of initiatives designed to stimulate female self-employment, the starting of business by women entrepreneur is not in line of expectation. The growth and participation of women entrepreneurship need both generic and specific theoretical perspective and research approach to understand this phenomenon. In spite of the growing number of female entrepreneurs, the share of female entrepreneurship is still significantly low when compared to their participation rate. There is support for the notion that women entrepreneurs entering self-employment are disadvantaged by their gender. The lack of integrative frameworks for understanding the nature and implications of issues related to sex, gender, and entrepreneurship has been a major obstacle. It is important to look at female entrepreneurs who, though they share many characteristics with their male colleagues, are unique in many aspects. The study has highlighted few consistent gender differences, and has suggested that those differences that do exist may have impact on business performance. This study also suggests that a new gender aware framework is required for holistic understanding of women’s entrepreneurship so that education and training is designed in such a way that overcome the social- economical, region specific and other factors adversely affecting the women entrepreneurship.