Promoting Women Entrepreneurship – Towards an Inclusive Growth

Abstract

Entrepreneurship - setting up new businesses - can stimulate innovation and invigorate local markets. Entrepreneurs assemble resources including innovations, finance and business acumen in an effort to transform innovations into economic goods. Entrepreneurship is now widely recognized as a tool of economic development in India. Because of this recognition, congenial supportive environment has been created over the years for the women and thus more and more women entrepreneur are getting involved in business as well as in self employment activities. Though media sings hymns of stories of a very few successful female professionals or entrepreneurs, the reality is scary. Literacy rate among women continues to be very low. Despite several claims and policies about their emancipation, only 10% of the entrepreneurs are women. Women's entrepreneurship needs to be studied separately for two main reasons. The first reason is that women's entrepreneurship has been recognised during the last decade as an important untapped source of economic growth. The second reason is that the topic of women in entrepreneurship has been largely neglected both in society in general and in the social sciences. Not only have women lower participation rates in entrepreneurship than men but they also generally choose to start and manage firms in different industries than men tend to do. Women's entrepreneurship is both about women's position in society and the role of entrepreneurship in the same society. Women are faced with specific obstacles (such as family responsibilities) that have to be overcome in order to give them access to the same opportunities as men. Increased participation of women in the labour force is a prerequisite for improving the position of women in society and self-employed women. Even though, policies have been formulated to promote and encourage spirit of entrepreneurship among women, there is still lot more to be done in this direction.