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Female entrepreneurship to date represents a key component of the business\ud sector worldwide as, in 2012 more than 187 million out of 400 million\ud entrepreneurs were women (Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2013). In academia\ud the gender factor in entrepreneurship emerged in the late 1970s Schwartz (Journal\ud of Contemporary Business, 5(1), 47–76, 1976) and especially since the beginning of\ud the new millennium a substantial growth in the investigation of this topic has been\ud registered. Thus, the time has come to systematize the academic progress on this issue\ud and to reflect on future research directions in order to gain deeper insights into the\ud female entrepreneurship domain. In this vein, our paper aims to enrich the conversation\ud on female entrepreneurship by reviewing 248 papers published in the last\ud 14 years. In doing so, we identify and analyze the new insights that have emerged\ud in the literature from both a managerial and a sociological perspective, thus\ud responding to the numerous calls for a more interdisciplinary approach to the study\ud of this topic

performance by contextualising the study within Italy and empirically analysing 307 Italian womenowned\ud firms.\ud Design/methodology/approach – By using ordinal regressions, this paper empirically investigates\ud the influence of three dimensions of the family context on female firms’ performance, namely: the\ud motivations to start a business; the support from the family once the business is established; and the\ud mechanisms to achieve a suitable balance between work and family life.\ud Findings – Overall, the results offer substantial support for the assumption that female business\ud owners benefit from being pulled into the endeavour, from specific linkages with family and also from\ud selected mechanisms to balance work and family life, thus contributing to show how strong the\ud relationship between a firm’s performance and the family context is for women.\ud Originality/value – Today female entrepreneurship represents an important economic driver\ud worldwide, leading scholars to strongly advocate the need to shift the female entrepreneurship\ud research focus from the analysis of women business owners’ characteristics to the investigation of\ud those specific factors able to directly affect female firms’ activities. In this vein, this paper aims at\ud pushing further into the still less studied domain of work/family intertwinement as, surprisingly,\ud the impact that family-related factors exert on women-owned businesses’ performance is still\ud under-researched

The aim of the paper is to explore the published management research on women entrepreneurs in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (also known as STEM) fields in order to offer a first, comprehensive state-of-the-art of this research. In doing so, a systematic literature review (SLR) of 32 papers has been undertaken. The results of this SLR show that the literature on this topic is still limited and fragmented. However, seeds have been sown for stimulating the theoretical debate and the empirical knowledge on these issues. Based on our analysis of these selected papers, we offer a vibrant research agenda for future developments.