While female entrepreneurship remains an untapped source for inclusive growth and innovation, we still lack the tools to support female entrepreneurs. Current debates center around the question why women’s entrepreneurship is limited today, treating it as a recent phenomenon. Nevertheless, historical case-studies prior to the twentieth century show that women participated in diverse forms of entrepreneurship in the past and hint to the possibly of profound (non-linear) changes in female entrepreneurship over time. In the absence of systematic diachronic data, however, we still know little about how female entrepreneurship developed over time, let alone about the validity of contemporary theories to explain changes over time and between regions. 

This project, therefore, aims to answer three key research questions about female entrepreneurship: 1) What barriers women face(d) when they start and run a business; 2) If and how these barriers change, and 3) How women’s solutions to these constraints change over time. Instead of single factors, this project is the first to explain how the interaction between the historical structural and institutional factors led to (non-linear) development of diverse patterns of female entrepreneurship in twentieth century Europe. It gathers new historical evidence on female business-owners and innovators from digital sources for a comparative analysis of 28 European countries since 1980, and archival sources for an in-depth case-study of the Netherlands, the UK, and France since 1900.

The project pioneers a comparative historical approach that combines statistical and qualitative techniques to uncover new explanations of female entrepreneurship in the long 20th century. It challenges the narrative of linear progression in female entrepreneurship, extend the focus to informal local solutions and underlines (combination of) structural and institutional conditions to explain the impact of varying policies. It thus lays the foundation for new intervention tools to increase female entrepreneurship.