My Shop, My Agency: Self-Efficacy Enhancement and Women's Entrepreneurial Empowerment Through Social Commerce Platforms

Entrepreneurship has long been theorized as a primary pathway to economic independence and social mobility. I have introduced the Self-Efficacy Enhancement Theory (SEET), an intervention oriented theoretical framework that constructs an integrated account of platform-mediated women's entrepreneurial empowerment. SEET proposes that empowerment is best understood as a tripartite, dynamically interacting construct consisting of three co-evolving dimensions: psychological self-efficacy, the belief in one's ability to think, decide, persist, and regulate emotions under entrepreneurial pressure; social self-efficacy, confidence in one's capacity to initiate, maintain, and strategically leverage digital social relationships for commercial purposes; and economic self-efficacy, the belief in one's ability to generate income, interpret market data, and achieve financial independence through platform-mediated entrepreneurial activity. These three dimensions, according to SEET, co-evolve in a self-sustaining empowerment loop, in which progress in any one dimension creates enabling conditions for advancement in the other two.