Women entrepreneurs’ financing revisited: taking stock and looking forward

Introduction: why this special issue?

It is more than 10 years since the special issue on women and the financing of their entrepreneurial ventures (Leitch and Hill 2006) was published in this journal. At that time, the editors drew on papers presented at the Diana International Research Symposium, held in Stockholm, to provide an overview of extant research into the financing of women-owned/led ventures. Five discrete categories of research were identified: characteristics and behaviours of women business owners; characteristics of their ventures; financial strategies adopted by women business owners, the relationships between those seeking finance (demand side) and those in a position to provide it (supply side) and, perhaps most notably, the impact of gender on women’s ability to rise finance for their ventures. The papers published in that special issue helped to shape a research agenda for scholars to pursue, highlighting the need for research designs to capture the heterogeneity of women business-owners and their ventures; include comparative investigations that give “voice” to women’s experiences of seeking and securing finance; adopt a longitudinal perspective and contribute to theory building.

The genesis of the call for this special issue arose from the continued interest in women’s approaches to acquiring financial and other resources to build and grow their ventures in papers presented at the DIANA International conferences (especially the 2014 conference in Stockholm and the 2015 conference held at Babson in the US), in addition to related women’s entrepreneurship fora and associated publications that have explored these issues. While the literature on gender and access to finance has been augmented significantly since the publication of the 2006 special issue, interest in this area remains a subject of debate for academics, policy-makers and business support professionals. Despite access to finance being amongst one of the most popular topics in women’s entrepreneurship research (Henry, Foss, and Ahl 2016), and notwithstanding improvements in the quality and robustness of studies in the area, we do not seem to have progressed far in terms of either theoretical development or in understanding the challenges which women continue to face in accessing entrepreneurial finance, whether formal or informal. The general themes that emerge from the literature continue to suggest that women’s start-ups tend to be smaller than men’s; under-capitalised with less likelihood of taking on debt finance, more risk-averse; locally based, young, and operating in sectors where growth may be limited. Further, these issues are more likely to be exacerbated for minority women and women in developing countries who face persistent disadvantages due to social and structural inequalities hampering their access to resources and positions of influence, thus reinforcing gender inequality (Bardasi, Sabarwal, and Terrell 2011; Blanchard, Zhao, and Yinger 2008; Stösic Panić 2017).

Consequently, we believe several questions still need to be addressed: Why does the gender gap persist in obtaining new venture finance? Do financing agencies discriminate against women entrepreneurs, or is this simply a perception? Does the persistent underrepresentation of women in the financing industry, especially in venture capital, play a role? Do women entrepreneurs have better access to new funding sources such as crowdfunding? What are the implications that research on financing women-owned businesses offer policy-makers and those supporting women entrepreneurs? In this special issue we endeavour to attend to some of these questions, and in so doing, encourage new perspectives on debates on gender and the financing of entrepreneurial ventures. Given the dominance of US, UK and European based scholars in this area and the focus on normative ideas, methods and approaches where concepts are considered to be broadly self-evident, and their qualities are objectively defined and essentialist, we were especially interested in papers that provided a more international perspective and that adopted more sophisticated research designs. We welcomed both empirical and conceptual papers, and were especially interested in those that adopted new perspectives on debates on gender and the financing of entrepreneurial ventures, reflecting global shifts in economies, cultures, business trends and social norms.

Following the formal call for papers and subsequent submission of manuscripts we organised the double blind, peer review process and, after a series of review and revision rounds, four papers were finally selected for this special issue (Alakaleek and Cooper 2018; Brush et al. 2018; Kwapisz and Hechavarría 2018; Naegels, Mori, and D’Espallier 2018). An additional paper on the Rising Tide angel training programme, presented at the 2017 DIANA conference in Kansas City, was also included after peer review (Coleman and Robb 2018). While each of these five papers offers its own unique perspective on women entrepreneurs and finance – drawing on different contexts, cultures and experiences –a number of common themes can be identified. First, they all highlight the particular challenges women face in accessing finance for their venture, regardless of sector, business size or stage of development. Second, they provide valuable insights into women’s experiences, enhancing our understanding of how women perceive, access and strategise financial capital. Third, they contribute to current debates in this area by highlighting the importance of anchoring women’s experiences in their specific social and economic contexts, the need for more multi-level analysis to capture the complex interplay of micro-level individual, meso-level organisational and macro-level national influences and more explicit interrogations of the underlying processes at play for women seeking and acquiring finance. These are all avenues worthy of future scholarly pursuit and offer the potential for valuable learning for academics, policy-makers, financiers and women entrepreneurs.

The demand and supply side of financing for women entrepreneurs: the same old story?

Over the past decade, research has continued to focus on the demand side of financing for women entrepreneurs, studying, for example, women’s access to finance at the start-up stage (Sena, Scott, and Roper 2012) or women entrepreneurs’ access to external finance (Carter et al. 2007; Shaw, Carter, and Lam 2010). Other studies have investigated supply-side related issues. For example, based on their examination of the role of women in the business angel market, Harrison and Mason (2007) have observed that in the UK, active women investors differ from their male counterparts only to a small extent. Generally, research has demonstrated the impact between a smaller number of women business angels and the gender-gap in angel funding rates and a tendency for women angels to refuse financing to women entrepreneurs, although they are more likely to seek funding from other women (Becker-Blease and Sohl 2007). Other scholars have explored loan-officers’ decision-making in the UK and Italy, suggesting that their sex influences lending decisions (Bellucci, Borisov, and Zazzaro 2010; Carter et al. 2007; Wilson et al. 2007).¹ With regard to government policies and other support mechanisms for women entrepreneurs seeking financial capital Coleman et al. (2017) found that policies generally sought to foster women’s entrepreneurship and close gender gaps in entrepreneurial ecosystems, even though no policy articulated the need to address systemic gender bias in lending protocols, investment criteria or programme delivery practices. Instead support programmes to foster access to finance implicitly understood women as an economic asset or resource.

In the first paper of this special issue, “The Gender Gap in Venture Capital: Progress, Problems and Perspectives”, Candida Brush, Patricia Greene, Lakshmi Balachandra and Amy Davis investigate the demand side of venture capital funding for women entrepreneurs. They highlight two key issues: first, financial capital is a critical resource for growing firms, and second, women entrepreneurs, despite progress, still attract fewer early stage equity investments, especially in relation to venture capital. Building on the original Diana Project analysis (Brush et al. 2003), in which all equity investments in US businesses were examined over a 30-year period, and drawing on the conceptual framework outlined in Greene et al. (2001), the authors compare the proportion of venture capital funding received by women and men entrepreneurs. Their data show that women entrepreneurs have made progress in attracting venture capital over the past decade, with the percentage of businesses with women on the executive team that received funding tripling during the past 13 years. They also present evidence showing a rise in the amount of funding provided to such companies, with the average amount of funding for those businesses with women entrepreneurs being equal to or higher than that for businesses with no women on their management teams. Despite this, however, they note that there is still a significant gender gap, with all-men venture teams being four times more likely to receive funding from venture capital investors than ventures with just one woman on their team. Indeed, according to their data, only 2.7% (183) of the companies that received venture capital funding had a woman CEO. Furthermore, 86% of all venture capital-funded businesses have no women in management positions.

By drawing on theories relating to networks, homophily and gender stereotypes, the authors update the framework proposed by Greene et al. (2001) and recommend that future research should focus more on “supply” rather than “demand” questions in order to better understand the persistent gender gap. Our knowledge about gender differences on the supply side and their – potential – impact on the access of women entrepreneurs to finance is – still –limited. Future research could investigate if homophily constrains women’s careers in the financing industries, and, consequently, their ability to access specific forms of finance. Also, it would be interesting to determine whether, and to what extent, women’s careers in the financial industries differ in fintechs and other new financial organisations, and whether this has a subsequent impact on women entrepreneurs’ access to finance.

A more global view on financing for women entrepreneurs

With little concerted academic attention being paid to women’s experiences in developing economies, one of our aims for this special issue was to move away from Western-centric understandings and to provide a more global view on some of the themes connected to financing women entrepreneurs. A complex range of variables undoubtedly affects female entrepreneurs’ experience of accessing finance, and it is important to place and understand these within the particular national, cultural, historical and institutional frameworks in which they operate and which perpetuate specific social beliefs and perspectives (Jamali 2009). Two papers in this special issue (Alakaleek and Cooper 2018; Naegels, Mori, and D’Espallier 2018) question Western and Anglo-Saxon perceptions of the gender finance gap, gendered financing structures and gendered institutions in different contexts, and highlight the interplay of different constellations of factors influencing the acquisition of finance by women.

Wejdan Alakaleek and Sarah Cooper’s paper “The female entrepreneur’s financial networks: Accessing finance for the emergence of technology-based firms in Jordan”, explicitly addresses some of our taken-for-granted knowledge and assumptions about the role that social capital plays for women entrepreneurs’ accessing finance. In their study they explore how female entrepreneurs in Jordan finance the establishment and growth of their technology-based ventures. Contrary to research from Western developed economies, which has demonstrated a dependence on informal capital secured via personal networks (Brush et al. 2002; Coleman and Robb 2011), their study illustrates that these technology-based women entrepreneurs rely more heavily on formal sources and networks. The authors use a network perspective to explore how the female founders of 16 technology-based firms in Jordan accessed sources of finance. Consistent with previous work by, for example, Hite and Hesterly (2001), Alakaleek and Cooper (2018) interrogate the female entrepreneur’s ego network for financial resource acquisition and analyse the network ties built with external actors. Their research investigates the dynamic nature and characteristics of the women’s financial ties, from start-up through to early-growth, and demonstrates how Jordanian women entrepreneurs secure more funding from formal sources than their Western counterparts. The women leverage benefits from connections established via formal events and networking platforms to facilitate development of their financial network ties at a very early stage.

The study contributes to our understanding of women entrepreneurs’ network development model by providing new insights into how women in Eastern societies fund the start-up and early growth of their ventures. The relative importance of formal, business ties – approached by female entrepreneurs at the start-up stage and subsequently utilised heavily over time to help identify and access financial sources – is also demonstrated. In addition, Alakaleek and Cooper (2018) point to the importance of networking platforms and events for those wishing to access financial resources as well as actors who could be a source of finance or provide access to others seeking to invest. Consequently, they suggest that future scholarship would benefit from focusing on the challenges of building financial ties and the mechanisms used/required to assist network development.

Moreover, the study has important implications for policy-makers as it demonstrates how increased efforts in building entrepreneurs’ networking meetings and clubs by different parties, entrepreneurial and government business organisations, private firms and universities, are all required. As the study sheds light on the business funding journey of women entrepreneurs in Jordan, it reminds us to pay much more attention than is currently visible in (published) literature on financing women entrepreneurs in “other” cultural and institutional contexts. We believe there is a communication gap because much of the work on financing women entrepreneurs in non-Western country contexts is conducted by international donor agencies, and published as reports, working papers or in practitioner-related outlets (e.g., Demirgüç-Kunt, Klapper, and Singer 2013; Mayoux 2002) and thus is less likely to be accepted for publication in the journals we (entrepreneurship) academics read and reference when debating and discussing women entrepreneurs and financing. Clearly this limits our understanding and potentially stymies debate and exchange between scholars, practitioners and policy-makers that can have deleterious consequences, for instance around the formulation of effective entrepreneurship policy (Arshed, Carter, and Mason 2014). This is not just a general concern as recent work has highlighted the unintended consequences, albeit of well-intended interventions, to increase the quantity and quality of female entrepreneurs that continues to reproduce women’s secondary position in the context of life and business opportunities and equality (Ahl and Nelson 2015; McAdam, Harrison, and Leitch forthcoming).

In addition, Alakaleek and Cooper’s study raises a number of interesting questions for future research, including whether the funding experiences of women varies from sector to sector, from country to country, as well as from that of their male counterparts. Why is it that technology-based women-owned businesses, in this particular cultural and institutional context, rely more on formal networks to access finance? The findings from this research contradict the commonly held assumption that women in a patriarchal society and/or emerging economy may have little access to formal networks, which would thus, force them to rely heavily on informal ones as has been shown in Hussain et al.’s (2010) work on China. Perhaps regulatory institutions play a role in explaining these results? Ultimately, we also see a more fundamental issue arising here in relation to the theories and concepts we use to understand our empirical results: a more global view on gender issues in financing can assist us in developing better – more contextualised – theories and concepts.

Did you ask for finance? Of gender stereotypes, perceptions and vicious circles

Since the special issue in 2006, more research on women’s entrepreneurship and finance has started to focus on the role perceptions and stereotypes play in accessing finance. The phenomenon of the “discouraged borrower” (Kon and Storey 2003; Mijid 2014), a creditworthy individual who does not apply for finance for fear of rejection still seems to be evident among women entrepreneurs (Leitch and Hill 2006). Sena, Scott, and Roper (2012) suggest that women perceive stronger financial barriers to entrepreneurship compared to men, which may discourage them from seeking external financing. However, we still do not have sufficient knowledge and insights into why this is the case: why do women – voluntarily – exclude themselves from external funding? Does this result from second-generation gender biases? Are there institutional and social structures which might perpetuate discriminatory practices irrespective of existence of equal opportunity legislation? Is this more evident in developed countries where arguably a more sophisticated (or complicated) regulatory regime might exist? Drawing from research in the very different cultural and institutional contexts of the United States and Tanzania, Kwapisz and Hechavarría (2018) and Naegels, Mori, and D’Espallier (2018) provide novel insights into these issues.

In their paper “Women Don’t Ask: An Investigation of Start-up Financing and Gender” Agnieszka Kwapisz and Diana Hechavarría consider whether women are less likely to ask for help financing their businesses. Drawing on data from the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics II (PSED II) in the United States, their study explores whether gender is a factor impacting the propensity to ask for financing among entrepreneurs. In this regard, the influence of non-owner founders or start-up helpers on the likelihood of asking for financing is also considered. The findings suggest that while being female significantly decreases the probability of asking for financing, the presence of start-up helpers significantly increases the incidence of asking for financing. Among those who created new ventures, the number of start-up helpers exponentially increased the incidence of asking for financing among female founders. This research contributes to theory by identifying the limits and boundary conditions regarding gender and entrepreneurial finance. For example, Kwapisz and Hechavarría (2018) find considerable evidence that gender is a key demand side factor in terms of asking for financing. Furthermore, among those who create new firms the effect of gender is attenuated when female nascent entrepreneurs utilise helpers during the start-up process. They recommend that future studies should investigate the tensions and paradoxes associated with being female and the processes of asking for financing and negotiating terms of financing beyond formal equity.

In An Institutional View on Access to Finance by Tanzanian Women owned Enterprises, Vanessa Naegels, Neema Mori and Bert D’Espallier illustrate the vicious circles which emerge when attention is placed on women’s perceptions in relation to seeking finance: women entrepreneurs only ask for external funding if they perceive this to be successful, but because they perceive that their knowledge is insufficient they refrain from asking. Drawing on survey data, and using regression analysis, Naegels, Mori, and D’Espallier (2018) investigate how perceptions of gendered cognitive and normative institutions determine whether a woman entrepreneur in Tanzania applies for a formal loan. Given that the lack of small business finance is the largest constraint to business growth for Tanzanian women entrepreneurs, the authors explore how the problems women experience in accessing finance are embedded in the country’s institutional framework. They argue that it is entrepreneurs’ perceptions of institutions and not institutions themselves that drive financing behaviour. Consequently, they find a lack of bank and microfinance loan applications by women entrepreneurs, with women-owned Tanzanian businesses choosing to rely on informal funding sources, such as personal savings and loans from family and friends. This is partly due to high interest rates on start-up loans, collateral requirements and guarantees. In addition, there is a lack of financing knowledge among women entrepreneurs in Tanzania, and a perception that loan applications will be rejected. The study contributes to the literature on institutional theory by highlighting how entrepreneurs’ perceptions of gendered normative and cognitive institutions influence demand for formal loans. Lower levels of both self-confidence and human capital were also found to have an impact. In contrast to previous studies, Naegels, Mori, and D’Espallier (2018) also found that Tanzanian women entrepreneurs who were part of a network were more likely to experience problems with collateral requirements, as were formalised businesses, specifically in relation to interest rates and personal guarantee requirements.

The results of both studies (Kwapisz and Hechavarría 2018; Naegels, Mori, and D’Espallier 2018) point to deeply ingrained gendered behaviour resulting from deep-rooted stereotypical thinking and attitudes that influence individual perceptions, which in turn have a significant impact on gender gaps in financing. It is striking that similar trends are evident in very different historical, cultural and institutional contexts. Both papers provide novel insights into the less visible – and, so far at least, understudied – facets that contribute to a gender gap in financing. They draw our attention to the important and hitherto overlooked role that perceptions have to play in the acquisition of financial resources. As a consequence, these studies are at the forefront of an emerging research stream that emphasises the importance of cognitions, perceptions and, more recently, rhetoric and language for financing decisions (Malmström, Johansson, and Wincent 2017). In other words, there has been a shift in attention from studying what is visible and easily accessible in terms of empirical research towards the more invisible explanations for a persistent gender gap in financing. This requires different methods and research techniques to capture these different more invisible phenomena. Reflexive and practice-based as well as interpretive research approaches (Baker, Powell, and Fultz 2017; Gartner 2007; Neergaard and Leitch 2015; Neergaard and Ulhøi 2007) may be able to shed more insights into these deep-rooted and invisible phenomena.

The Rising Tide Angel Training Program was launched to address the public policy priority of increasing the number of growth-oriented women-owned firms by expanding the entrepreneurial ecosystem in ways that will benefit women. In particular, the program was designed to address structural weaknesses in a key component of the entrepreneurial ecosystem, women’s access to financial capital in the form of equity, mentorship, and contacts. It was launched in the fall of 2015 with the goal of increasing the number of women angel investors capable of investing in growth-oriented women-owned firms through a program of education, training, and hands-on experience with the angel investing process. The first program involved 9 experienced investors and 90 aspiring investors, of which 49 participated in the research.

Coleman and Robb draw three conclusions from their analysis of the first cohort through the program. The first of these key points is the importance of an approach that combines both education and experience for engaging women as angel investors. This suggests that women, who have not traditionally participated in angel investing to the extent that men have, can benefit from educational activities designed to help them learn the “nuts and bolts” of angel investing. Second, this analysis points to the power of an investing network that consists of 99 women with different backgrounds and areas of expertise, establishing a platform for the exchange of experiences and access to the advice of more sophisticated investors. This serves as a means for increasing self-efficacy and willingness to invest in both current and future high growth ventures launched by women entrepreneurs. Third, the authors argue that the Rising Tide Angel Training Program can serve as a prototype for addressing other gaps in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, including minority investors (male and female), impact investing, and early stage investing in emerging economies. As such, it has the potential to address some of the formal and informal institutional gaps that restrict entrepreneurship, and women’s entrepreneurship in particular identified by other contributors to this special issue.

What we don’t know (yet) – themes not addressed

Whilst so far, we have introduced the novel insights provided by the five papers in this special issue, we now turn to look at two themes that have not (yet) been addressed and, we argue, require further attention. First, we did not receive a single submission that explicitly addressed the financial crisis and its (potential) impact on financing for women’s entrepreneurship. We see a fundamental issue arising for our research agenda on women entrepreneurs and their access to finance that we should be aware of and try to address in future research. Many studies in this area, with a few notable exceptions, conduct research of the gender gap in financing at a micro and individual level. So far, we know little about the impact of institutional (i.e., regulatory and normative), macroeconomic and general policies on financing for women’s entrepreneurship; the extent to which the recent regulatory and structural reforms of banking and financial services in the Western world or general structural reforms elsewhere impact on gender gaps in financing.² In other words, we appear to have a pronounced tendency to set aside macroeconomic and policy-related topics that could help us in shedding a different light on gender gaps in financing. We would like to illustrate our argument with selected articles that take a different – more macro-oriented – perspective. Although none of them explicitly studies women entrepreneurs’ financing, they demonstrate how a broader and different perspective on financing issues opens up new research questions.

Feminist economists, for example, draw our attention to the link between the financial crisis, rhetoric and language, and the financial architecture in a wide sense. Grabel (2013) understands the global financial crisis as an opportunity for a more inclusive and feminist agenda for international organisations such as the International Monetary Fund, while Griffin (2013), by closely considering who can be held responsible for the global financial crisis, provides thought-provoking insights into it. Her study is of interest and relevance to research on women entrepreneurs’ financing because she clearly outlines the role and impact of gendered power constellations and privilege in the global economy. Similarly, Allon (2014) emphasises the need to understand the global financial crisis as a gendered crisis. Transferring this to our topic, we propose that future research not only analyses the gendered structures of the financing industries, but also explores whether and to what extent gendered discourses in politics and financing industries influence, more generally, economic financing policies, amongst others, thus – implicitly – reinforcing gender financing gaps.

In a similar vein, Demirgüç-Kunt, Klapper, and Singer (2013) demonstrate the impact of general institutional norms and regulations on women’s access to finance. Drawing on the Global Financial Inclusion (Global Findex) database, the authors show that legal discrimination against women as well as gender norms contribute to explaining some of the cross-country variations in access to finance. Where women are legally restricted in their access to labour markets, as household heads, in their right to choose where to live and to receive inheritances, they are less likely to own bank accounts. Additionally, restrictive gender norms reflected in the level of violence against women and early marriage age for girls, partly explained gender-related variations in the use of financial services. In essence, women’s seclusion from the public arena and their lack of mobility impacts on their ability to raise finance, thus directly impeding on their entrepreneurial endeavours. In addition, it may impact on their perceptions of having restricted access to finance.

Second, none of the submissions to this special issue explicitly addressed new forms of finance and women’s participation in these, either from the supply or the demand side perspective. This means that we know little about the attitudes, behaviours and experiences of women, both as entrepreneurs and as funders in this arena: for instance, do women profit from these new trends? Research on equity crowdfunding investors, for example, has shown an investor pattern we know too well from venture and angel capital investments: women investors are underrepresented in equity crowdfunding, they appear to be more risk-averse and more biased in their assessment of the competence of other women, thus duplicating men’s investment decisions (Mohammadi and Shafi 2017). Marom, Robb, and Sade (2016) similarly confirm well-known financing patterns for women ventures in their analysis of the Kickstarter platform: women ask and raise lower funding amounts compared to men, and they dominate “typical” female projects such as dance, fashion, food. Interestingly though, their data also showed that women, compared to men, were more successful in obtaining their funding. Further, their analysis confirmed a clear pattern of women investors preferring women-led projects, indicating that women entrepreneurs indeed may profit from new funding trends. This is illustrated by other studies, demonstrating that gender differences seem to be overcome by the “wisdom of the lending crowd” (Barasinska and Schäfer 2014). Gorbatai and Nelson (2015) suggest that the communication style and language of crowdfunding platforms favour women, again pointing to the need to apply different research techniques which allow us to analyse the gendered impact of hitherto neglected factors influencing access to finance, such as language and individual sense-making. Based on US data from Kickstarter, Greenberg and Mollick (2017) add a potentially useful theoretical perspective, outlining a theory of “activist choice homophily” where women are more inclined to fund women entrepreneurs because of perceived shared structural barriers that come from a mutual social identity. However, the results are far from conclusive, which provides many opportunities for future studies to investigate women entrepreneurs’ financing via new forms and platforms, to further our understanding of gender gaps as well as to develop our theories.

Concluding thoughts

In conclusion, while we have made much progress in deepening our knowledge on women’s entrepreneurship and access to finance, as demonstrated by the four articles in this special issue, we also see several promising avenues for future research arising both from these articles and from themes that are absent. Specifically, we argue that this topic would benefit from embracing a multiplicity of contexts approach (Welter 2011), identifying how and which multiple factors influence, for example, the likelihood of asking for particular financing among early stage and growing entrepreneurs, and how contextually different influences such as language and cognitions shape the individual’s sense-making and her understanding of financing as problematic or not.

In addition, we suggest that there are also two fundamental points of which we should be aware because they continue to direct our thinking on women entrepreneurs’ financing. First, we are concerned that research and policy on women entrepreneurs’ financing remains predicated on the deficit model, the “why a women entrepreneur can’t be more like a man?” approach (Marlow and Swail 2014). In particular, policy often still reflects such an implicit deficit model: Women entrepreneurs have small businesses, therefore, they only require small amounts of funding – resulting in (yet) another micro credit fund. At the same time, we tend to argue that women entrepreneurs need more access to venture capital (or business angel financing), implicitly assuming as soon as this gender gap is closed there would be a boom in high-growth women’s entrepreneurship. However, as Welter et al. (2017) have argued we fall into a trap of focusing on a small percentage of what constitutes entrepreneurship, namely the one per cent (if at all) high-growth, technology-oriented and venture-backed businesses, whilst the majority of new and existing ventures will never access venture capital financing, regardless of the sex of their owner. We support their call to overcome our thinking in dichotomies and to conduct more research on the everyday practice of entrepreneurship, in particular the (innovative) ways in which women entrepreneurs finance their businesses in many different contexts.

Second, given that debates in entrepreneurship are mirroring those in other disciplines, such as leadership (Harrison, Leitch, and McAdam 2015; Henry et al. 2015; Leitch and Harrison 2018), there also is an opportunity to adopt multidisciplinary, or indeed transdisciplinary, perspectives to interrogate women’s access to financing. Indeed, as it is part of the global “wicked” problem of gender inequality and exclusion, transdisciplinarity provides an opportunity for entrepreneurship scholars to demonstrate their engagement more explicitly in socially responsible science to address such an intractable social problem and to influence policy (Bernstein 2015). Given transdisciplinarity’s emphasis on stakeholder involvement, such approaches are consistent with the recent calls above for much closer engagement between academics, practitioners and policymakers working in the entrepreneurial domain. They are also consistent with calls that we should actively communicate the findings of our scholarship on women’s entrepreneurship to a wider research community (Baker and Welter 2017; Jennings and Brush 2013). An apparent lack of dialogue between key players remains an issue for the field despite Gibb’s (2000) calls almost twenty years ago for increasing intimacy between the different stakeholders involved with SMEs to avoid the dangers of perpetuating and acting on myths and mythical concepts such as growth-oriented ventures. Closer communication represents an opportunity to identify shared frames of reference and meanings, and to ensure that the sets of assumptions about the way in which the world works and subsequent priorities about how it should work are foregrounded so that policy is not based on erroneous suppositions – this should lead to improved understanding and help to avoid polarisation.

Claire Leitch
Lancaster University
[email protected]
Friederike Welter
IfM Bonn, Bonn
University Siegen
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4831-9523
Colette Henry
Dundalk Institute of Technology

Notes

1. See also the short review of relevant literature in Poggesi, Mari, and De Vita (2016).

2. Although beyond the scope of this article, we suggest that it would be interesting to see whether finance and economics journals pick up these topics and what we as entrepreneurship researchers could learn from them and vice versa. See also Baker and Welter (2017) who suggest an urgent need for more communication between researchers from different entrepreneurship subfields.