Emprendimiento femenino en América Latina: una aproximación teórica

Abstract

Women's entrepreneurship has been a topic that has increasingly aroused the interest of governments, academics and society in general, because it has become a factor that allows facing important challenges of humanity, such as inclusion, inequality and gender stereotyping. In the specific case of Latin America, approximately 3 out of 10 women do not have their own income, and according to ECLAC, 118 million women in this region work in the informal sector, an issue worsened by the Covid-19 pandemic, which will bring the female labor participation rate in 2021 to 46%, further exacerbating the inequality between men and women at the regional level. Therefore, given the unquestionable relevance of the topic, this paper analyzes research on female entrepreneurship in Latin America to identify its determinants and learn how it has evolved. To this end, a systematic literature review of the documents published in Web of Science was carried out. The main findings made it possible to identify the determinants that make a woman decide to become an entrepreneur through a classification of 4 categories: socioeconomic, business, political and psychological. In addition, an analysis was made of female entrepreneurship from the institutional theory. Finally, some future research extensions are suggested due to the importance and lack of deepening of gender entrepreneurship in Latin America.