Female entrepreneurship is not only an indicator of economic inclusion; it is also a barometer of a country’s institutional quality. When more women create businesses, productive capacity, job creation, and competitiveness grow. However, even as the number of women entrepreneurs increases, only a small proportion manage to build high-impact firms—that is, ventures with accelerated growth or an advanced scientific or technological base.
The relevant question is no longer why women become entrepreneurs, but what conditions determine whether their ventures are growth-oriented or scalable. The article “Understanding institutional dimensions in high-impact female entrepreneurship” (Review of Managerial Science, 2024), co-authored with Tatiana López and David Urbano (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), analyzes how institutional environments influence women entrepreneurs’ decisions to build businesses with high growth potential.
Whether a venture scales does not depend solely on the entrepreneur’s individual profile, experience, or risk tolerance. The truly critical factor is the institutional fabric in which businesses are born and developed. Rules, social norms, and cultural perceptions not only shape entrepreneurship—they determine the types of firms women are able to build.
Our study uses a mixed-methods approach to show that institutional dimensions do not operate in isolation but interdependently, and that their alignment is a necessary condition for achieving high-impact outcomes, particularly in job creation and technology-based entrepreneurship.
Three dimensions that drive growth
According to the research, three institutional dimensions influence female entrepreneurship:
- Regulative, which includes the quality of laws, bureaucratic burdens, innovation incentives, formal access to financing, and legal certainty.
- Normative, associated with social expectations, gender roles, cultural pressure regarding success or failure, support from one’s close environment, and the social acceptance of entrepreneurship as a legitimate pathway for women.
- Cultural-cognitive, which reflects dominant beliefs about who can be an entrepreneur, who can lead in technology, and who has the social permission to grow and accumulate economic power.
The study shows that the growth of women-led ventures does not depend on the regulatory environment alone, but on the co-existence of laws with favorable social norms and narratives that legitimize women as builders of scalable businesses. When any of these three dimensions fails, high-impact potential is significantly reduced.
Institutional interaction is not optional—It is necessary
While many analyses treat institutions as independent variables, our study reveals something deeper: certain configurations act as necessary conditions for achieving high-impact outcomes. Among the most important is the interaction of favorable regulation, supportive social norms, and cultural perceptions that legitimize women’s capacity to scale.
It is not enough for a country to have financing available if female risk-taking is socially penalized. Nor is it sufficient to support women entrepreneurs if access to capital, STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), or technological scaling is structurally limited. This finding underscores that an ecosystem is only as strong as its weakest link.
For Latin America—where female entrepreneurship is high but scaling is rare—this conclusion is crucial. The region has many women starting businesses, but not always the institutional conditions that enable those ventures to become high-growth firms.
The type of entrepreneurship matters
Another decisive finding is that the type of entrepreneurship conditions the institutional effect. Opportunity-driven entrepreneurs respond much more strongly to environmental conditions than those who start businesses out of economic necessity.
This means that institutions can amplify—or diminish—the probability of scaling, but only when the founder is in a position to choose growth rather than simply survive.
In Latin America, where a significant share of women-led businesses emerges as an alternative to formal employment —not from the identification of a market opportunity—this distinction is key. The challenge is not to increase women’s participation in entrepreneurship, but to transform conditions so that growth becomes a real option rather than a privilege of context.
Which actors influence the outcome, and how
Our paper also identifies how different stakeholders activate—or inhibit—the high-impact potential of women entrepreneurs:
- Governments: Their responsibility is not only to regulate better, but to design agile policies for high-growth sectors, reducing bureaucratic frictions and enabling specific incentives for women-led technology ventures.
- Capital ecosystems: Access to venture capital cannot continue reproducing biases. Our study suggests that financing mechanisms and criteria that prioritize growth potential over preexisting networks can alter the distribution of opportunities.
- Academia and the education system: Early participation of women in STEM and high-impact entrepreneurial training increases the probability of creating scalable firms. It is not only about skills, but about expanding the professional imagination of what is possible.
- Close environments and family: Family support—including family financing—becomes a critical enabler when the formal ecosystem does not fully close the gaps.
Implications for Latin America
First, while the proportion of women starting businesses in Latin America is high, women’s participation in technology, deep-tech, or large-scale job-creating ventures remains limited. This is not due to a lack of intention but to incomplete institutional configurations.
Second, public debate often focuses on inspiring more women to become entrepreneurs rather than enabling their ventures to grow. This paper confirms that the gap is not motivational, but structural and institutional.
Finally, unless scaling policies—not merely business-creation policies—are developed, ecosystems will continue producing women-led ventures, but few will be high-impact.
The main contribution of this study is to shift the question from the individual to the systemic level. The real issue is not why women become entrepreneurs, but why the ecosystem allows only some to scale—and under what conditions that can change.
More than a personal attribute, growth is an institutional response. Women entrepreneurs do not need to be pushed to “dare more”; they need ecosystems that legitimize their growth, finance their expansion, and do not punish their ambition to build large, technological, global companies.
Autora
Research Professor of the Department of Strategy and Leadership