Entrepreneurial Skills and Women’s Empowerment: A Bibliometric and Content Analysis of Capability Formation in Entrepreneurship Research
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Abstract
Research on women’s entrepreneurship has grown rapidly, especially around empowerment, financial inclusion and development policy. Yet the literature still offers an uneven explanation of how entrepreneurial skills contribute to empowerment. This study examines how research on women’s entrepreneurial empowerment has developed intellectually and thematically, with particular attention to the position of entrepreneurial skills. Using 447 peer-reviewed journal articles indexed in Scopus and Web of Science (2000–2025), it combines bibliometric mapping with a theory-informed content analysis of 50 purposively diversified articles. Bibliometric results show a field anchored by broad entrepreneurship and empowerment themes; skill development is visible but remains weakly integrated with the central entrepreneurship–empowerment structure. Content analysis shows recurring links from training to capability formation and from entrepreneurial capabilities to enterprise outcomes, while links from capabilities to agency and from enterprise achievement to multidimensional empowerment are less consistently developed. The findings therefore refine the capability gap: capability-oriented research is present, but the conversion mechanisms linking resources, capabilities, agency and empowerment remain fragmented. The study develops a theory-informed framework that treats entrepreneurial skills as potential, context-dependent conversion factors rather than as a fixed causal mechanism.
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