Gender in Micro‐Enterprise Research: Recent Trends, Thematic Inquiry, and Future Directions

Gender is increasingly visible in micro‐enterprise research, although its conceptual role within the wider literature remains unclear. This study examines how gender has been positioned and repositioned across three periods: 1988–2018, 2019–2023, and 2024–2025. A longitudinal bibliometric analysis of 12,252 publications combines keyword‐frequency analysis, multiple correspondence analysis, and period‐specific thematic maps. The findings show that gender initially occupied a peripheral cluster associated with entrepreneurship and the entrepreneur. During the middle period, it became a basic theme linked to entrepreneur and India, indicating high relevance but limited internal development. In the most recent period, gender, entrepreneur, and microenterprise formed a motor theme, indicating growing conceptual importance. Across the corpus, gender was positioned closest to financial inclusion, education, social capital, and women, between the microfinance instruments and the innovation‐and‐performance vocabulary that anchor opposite ends of the conceptual structure. The study shows that gender is becoming more relevant to how micro‐enterprise scholarship conceptualizes the enterprise actor, while exposing the continuing separation between resource‐access explanations and accounts of entrepreneurial action and outcomes.