Systematic Review of Determinants of Rural Women Entrepreneurs’ Success: Research Progress and Future Agenda

Women’s entrepreneurship is well known for its significance in upholding the economic prosperity of many nations. However, in today’s unprecedented environment, rural women entrepreneurs have become increasingly vulnerable to relentless and catastrophic events, raising serious concerns among economies that are predominantly driven by this sector. Various determinants serve as crucial enablers of success for rural women entrepreneurs. Therefore, this systematic literature review aims to profile existing studies on women's entrepreneurship and to deepen the understanding of the determinants of success among rural women entrepreneurs. This paper systematically reviews studies on success determinants in the context of rural women entrepreneurs from 1994 to 2024, based on the PRISMA protocol. A bibliographic coupling analysis was conducted using VOSviewer software to identify the primary research themes and trends related to the relationship. The findings have shown that Tigges and Green have the highest citation rate for their work published in 1994, and most research on rural women’s entrepreneurship was published using quantitative methods. The coverage of women entrepreneurship includes agriculture, arts and humanities, business management, computer sciences, economics, finance, engineering, mathematics, social sciences, and women’s studies. Descriptive findings also indicated that India has the highest interest in rural women entrepreneurship. Lower-middle-income economies have the highest number of publications compared to other income economies. Findings from the bibliometric coupling analysis reveal 10 clusters that indicate the knowledge structure and mapping of research streams in rural women’s entrepreneurship. This study presents a novel framework, providing an in-depth understanding for the research community to explore rural women’s entrepreneurship research and propose future research directions that contribute to the sustainable development of rural women entrepreneurs.