Gender Gap in Entrepreneurship and the Emergence of ‘Necessity Entrepreneurs’

With the passage of time, it is now increasingly being realised by the policymakers across the world that gainful employment which is the need of the hour cannot only be realised through regular forms of wage-based earning. Selfemployment, primarily through ways of entrepreneurship development, holds the key for a developing country like India to reap the full advantage of its demographic dividend. Policies like Startup India and Standup India exactly reflect this. However, crucial to exploiting the demographic dividend is the ability of the country to utilise its female labour force productively. Given the lack of opportunities for regular wage-based employment, the only panacea to this seems to be through encouraging more and more women towards entrepreneurship activities. Women in most developing countries including India, however, face a lot more difficulties in every walk of life than their male counterparts. Entrepreneurship is nothing different. This often can discourage women from setting up operations, leading to a far lesser number of women entrepreneurs than their male counterparts. Hence arises the ‘gender gap’. Further, most of the very few women who take up entrepreneurship in India, often do so due to the ‘push factors’ rather than the ‘pool factors’, that is female entrepreneurship is mostly necessity driven than being opportunity driven. With this backdrop, this paper tries to analyse female entrepreneurship in the Indian context and study problems and prospects of the same.