Mapping gender-specific incubators: impact, frameworks and future directions in women's entrepreneurship

Purpose This article evaluates the empirical and conceptual evidence on the impact of gender-specific business incubators, accelerators, and entrepreneurship support organizations published between 2010 and 2025. It responds to recent calls within the International Journal of Gender and Entrepreneurship (Jones et al., 2025; Woods and Orser, 2026) to strengthen feminist theory building in entrepreneurship research and to scrutinize the institutional structures that support, or constrain, women, girls and gender-diverse founders. Design/methodology/approach A systematic literature review was conducted following the PRISMA 2020 protocol (Page et al., 2021). Searches across Scopus, Web of Science, Emerald Insight, EBSCO Business Source Complete, and JSTOR yielded 312 records, of which 35 peer-reviewed articles and books and 11 institutional and grey-literature sources (46 sources in total) were retained for thematic synthesis. A descriptive bibliometric overlay was undertaken to identify publication trends, intellectual structure, and geographic coverage. Findings The literature converges on three observations. First, gender-specific incubators produce measurable gains in capital access, network density, and venture survival, yet the magnitude of those gains is conditional on national gender egalitarianism, sector orientation, and program design (Dutt and Kaplan, 2026; McAdam et al., 2019). Second, the field remains theoretically pluralistic but methodologically thin, with qualitative case studies dominating and few counterfactual designs (Henry et al., 2016). Third, the evidence base is geographically skewed toward the Global North, with the ASEAN region, sub-Saharan Africa, and Indigenous contexts under-represented. Originality/value Six themes are synthesized into a co-constitutive analytical framework, supported by a typology distinguishing gender-specific, gender-aware, and gender-blind incubation models. The discussion advances the entrepreneurial feminism perspective (Orser et al., 2011, 2013; Woods and Orser, 2026) by clarifying how incubation, as a sited institutional practice, mediates the gendered architecture of entrepreneurial ecosystems (Brush et al., 2019). An illustrative application to the Philippine and ASEAN context identifies the absence of peer-reviewed empirical research as the field's most acute geographic gap.