Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on women’s entrepreneurship and internationalization in order to build an understanding about future trends. There is increasing interest in the role of women in entrepreneurship yet little research has been conducted about the link to internationalization patterns. Design/methodology/approach – The literature is reviewed based on a systematic analysis of the words women, female, gender and internationalization. Findings – Three main schools of thought around women’s entrepreneurship and internationalization (philosophy, management and motivations) are then discussed. The analysis of literature and classification into main theories enables the building of new research around women’s entrepreneurship and internationalization. Originality/value – There is a pipeline of women intending to become entrepreneurs so this paper helps to understand how women entrepreneurs influence internationalization patterns and how to help support women in their business endeavors.

Introduction

Entrepreneurship plays a fundamental and dominant role in many developed and emerging economies (Ramaswamy, 2013). Increasingly, there is more interest in women entrepreneurs who contribute to the economic and social fabric of the international business community (Brush et al., 2010). Whilst the evolution of women entrepreneurial activity in the last few years has been a crucial element in the economic and social development of many nations (Noguera et al., 2013), there is a lack of a coherent framework and inconsistent research about the internationalization perspective on women entrepreneurship. This has led to there being a number of different methodological and theoretical perspectives about the role of gender and entrepreneurship (Henry et al., 2015). Whilst the concept of internationalization has been initiated before in international entrepreneurship (e.g. Etemad, 2015; Kraus et al., 2016), the pace has not kept up to date with women entrepreneur’s involvement in the process of internationalization. Given the paucity of research on women’s entrepreneurship and internationalization, it is important to understand the patterns and trends and there needs to be more of an understanding about the differences in the number of women entrepreneurs in developed, developing and emerging countries due to cultural and societal restrictions. This is because the cultural context of a country shapes people’s perceptions about women entrepreneurs ( Jennings and Brush, 2013). Moreover, whilst the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Report is starting to focus more on women’s entrepreneurship as a driver of international growth, there is still a lack of understanding about how women compared to men internationalize their business operations (Kelley, 2017). This has led to suggestions that some countries are more conducive to women’s entrepreneurship due to societal conditions (Minniti and Naudé, ۲۰۱۰). Aidis et al. (2007) state that internationalization involves the interaction among various economic, institutional and transitional factors, which may influence the development of women’s entrepreneurship.