The importance of homophile, strong ties, and social structures for female entrepreneurship in India

Abstract

The literature on women's entrepreneurship has significantly improved our understanding of the significance of focusing on women's contextual embeddedness for entrepreneurial activity. Our study uses a mixed-embeddedness perspective to explain how the multiple layers of women's embeddedness, particularly within the household-family and microcredit groups, enable or constrain women's microbusiness ownership in rural south India. Our study found that not all characteristics of women's household-family and microcredit group play a role in women's micro-business ownership by collecting and analysing data from over 9,800 women belonging to 649 microcredit groups in a region of south India. Women appear to rely on a limited number of capital resources related to the household-family, i.e. the home.

Keywords- Women’s entrepreneurship, mixed-embeddedness, quantitative, multi-level, microcredit, India