Scaling women-owned entrepreneurial ventures: past, present and future

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to objectively investigate extant literature on the scaling of women’s entrepreneurial ventures and advance the theory of women’s entrepreneurship by synthesizing new research domains. Design/methodology/approach Using an integrative literature review approach, a form of research that reviews, critiques and synthesizes representative literature on a topic in an integrated way, this study provides a review of 221 articles pertaining to women’s entrepreneurship scaling-up literature. Findings The authors identified several interrelated research areas that affect the scaling up of women’s ventures. For instance, individual factors, life and career stages, entrepreneurial teams, capital acquisition, socio-cultural factors and institutional factors. These along with the venture lifecycle stage and industry sector can help determine the variance in the scaling up of women’s ventures. Research limitations/implications With the aim to stimulate research discussions in the area of scaling up women-owned businesses, the authors propose an integrative framework. Results could be extended to other populations including young entrepreneurs, disabled entrepreneurs, immigrants, etc. Originality/value This paper offers a re-conceptualization of scaling of women-owned entrepreneurial ventures that acknowledges the context of women’s entrepreneurship. Incorporating venture lifecycle stages, industry sector and nested levels of analysis (micro, meso and macro), this framework can be a starting point to situate, theorize and test the factors that explicate the scaling of women-owned ventures.