Women in business and social media: implications for female entrepreneurship in Emerging Countries

The aim of this study 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 the studies conducted so far have addressed these issues: how and why are women entrepreneurs and managers using social media? Do they use social media for marketing, networking or personal reasons? The article relies on a literature review about women entrepreneurs/managers and social media. For this purpose, a literature search on Scopus has been carried out, using a set of selected keywords. Selected papers have been analysed and classified in an attempt to identify main topics, and results obtained thanks to research and analysis carried out so far. This study contributes to the expansion of literature on women in business studies, and offers a new perspective applied to a topic of high relevance such as social media. The study 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. Surprisingly, none of the extracted papers concerning how and why women in business use social media refer to developed economies. The common feature of these papers is that they concern women entrepreneurs in emerging economies, mainly Kenya, Indonesia, Nigeria, Egypt and South Africa. In these countries, social media can open up new opportunities for female entrepreneurs, and encourage the creation of new businesses run by women, thanks to their flexibility and their attributes. The major implication is to advance knowledge and practice in the area of gender in management and use of social media by focusing on 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.