Women in Business and social media: state of the art and research agenda

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to carry out a literature review on women in business and social media in order to know the state-of-the-art and to understand whether and to what extent studies conducted so far have addressed these issues: how and why women entrepreneurs and managers are using social media? Do they use social media for marketing, networking, or personal reasons? Design/methodology/approach –The article relies on a literature review about women entrepreneurs/managers and social media. For this purpose a literature search on Scopus has been conducted, using a set of selected keywords. Selected papers have been analyzed and classified, in an attempt to identify main topics and results obtained thanks to research and analysis carried out so far. Originality/value – This paper contributes to expand the literature on women in business studies and it offers a new perspective applied to a topic of high relevance as social media. Our literature review puts in evidence that this is a new issue, which gives us the possibility to identify new trends and future directions for research. Practical implications – The major implication is to advance knowledge and practice in the area of gender in management and use of social media by focusing upon empirical research, theoretical developments, practice and current issues. Benefits are related to a better understanding of the debate on “Gender and Management” themes by reconsidering networking activities with social media.