High-Growth Women’s Entrepreneurship : Programs, Policies and Practices

While women’s entrepreneurship is widely recognized as a source of economic and social development, there is a persistent storyline that women entrepreneurs do not perform as well as their male counterparts, and research examining performance and growth shows inconclusive results regarding gender differences in performance and the causes of them. This introduction chapter defines programs, policies, and practices, and explains why they matter for understanding and stimulating higher levels of growth among women’s businesses. This chapter provides an outline for the book that is organized about three key themes that emerged from the research produced by the collaborators in this book: the practice of building networks, programs and the support environment, and policies and regulations. These three themes comprise the elements of our new framework for policies, programs and practices for high-growth women’s entrepreneurship