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Gender Equality ▶ Gender Inequality and Female Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries
measures to gauge success, as well as the presence of institutional support that facilitates women’s equitable access to the resources they need to start-up, grow, and sustain their business ventures.
Introduction
Gender Inequality and Female Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries Tolulope Olarewaju1 and Julia Fernando2 1 Staffordshire Business School, Staffordshire University, Stoke-on-Trent, UK 2 Aston Business School, Aston University, Birmingham, UK
Synonyms Developing economies; Female entrepreneurship; Gender equality; Women and entrepreneurship; Women in business; Women’s economic empowerment
Definitions Gender inequality refers to differences between males and females. Female entrepreneurship occurs when women engage in venture creation. Female entrepreneurship may be a route to women’s socioeconomic advancement in developing countries but this relies on the use of gender and context-sensitive
Gender inequality is one of the oldest and most pervasive forms of inequality in the world. It denies women their voices, devalues their work, and makes women’s positions unequal to men’s. Despite some significant progress to change this in recent years, in no country do women have economic equality with men, and women are still more likely than men to live in poverty (Daly 2019). Across the world, women are in the lowest-paid work and on average they earn 24% less than men (Huffman et al. 2017; Oxfam 2020). Gender inequality is particularly problematic in developing countries. Here 75% of women are in the informal economy, where they are less likely to have employment contracts, legal rights or social protection, and are often not paid enough to escape poverty. Six hundred million women in developing countries are in the most insecure and precarious forms of work (Hannum et al. 2009; Oxfam 2020). Research also shows that in many developing countries, women occupy fewer senior positions, earn less than their male counterparts, are less likely to own land, and are more disproportionately affected by the haphazard
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 W. Leal Filho et al. (eds.), Decent Work and Economic Growth, Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95867-5
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Gender Inequality and Female Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries
application of customary and religious laws (Bertrand et al. 2015; Olarewaju 2019). Furthermore, gender differences driven by social norms might exist for occupational statuses. For example, Boden (1996) reports that women are more likely than men to shoulder familyrelated obligations, especially child-rearing, and there is evidence that this affects the female propensity to be entrepreneurial. While the value that women create in familial environments cannot be ignored, they often face a bias in paid employment, commonly called a “glass ceiling” (Ng and Sears 2017). To compound matters, many developing countries have rigid informal perceptions of
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