Women's Entrepreneurship Policy: Enhancing Female Business Ownership in the Digital Era

The entrepreneurial ecosystem is shaped by digital technologies, which are seen as a major source of transformation in the environment. The policy has a significant power to influence entrepreneurial behaviour nationally and internationally because it is a context-specific factor that is incorporated into a country's institutional structure. This is especially relevant for women's entrepreneurship. This chapter explores women's entrepreneurship, with a particular focus on the role of women’s entrepreneurship policy in the digital era. This chapter will discuss the government policy to empower women (digital) entrepreneurs to undertake digital entrepreneurial activities in the 10 Asian member states (AMS) in Southeast Asia that belong to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The Southeast Asian context provides an understudied and relevant research context in which it is possible to analyse the role of women’s entrepreneurship policy to empower the digital women's entrepreneurial ecosystem. This chapter highlights the crucial role of government policies in supporting the creation of a digital entrepreneurial ecosystem. The findings demonstrate that government policies must promote knowledge of digital technology, build the digital capacity of women entrepreneurs, and launch new laws to empower women entrepreneurs in the digital era. The findings also indicate that women entrepreneurs’ participation in the digital economy can be defined by their levels of female digital skills, access to digital finance, engagement and participation in accelerator programs, and receiving government support to foster national digital entrepreneurship. This chapter conceptualises a new untapped context of women's entrepreneurship policy systems in the women entrepreneurship literature by uncovering blended women entrepreneurship policies, encompassing several dimensions: gender, space, and time (digital era). This chapter offers a deeper knowledge of the link between several topologies of women entrepreneurship policies and the typologies of women entrepreneurship challenges in a specific context and in the digital era.