Barriers and Enablers of Women Entrepreneurs in the Digital Start-up Ecosystem.

Abstract

This paper will discuss impediments and facilitators that affect women entrepreneurs in the digital

start-up environment with special attention to the digital capability, the access to fintech, the social-

cultural obstacles, and the perceived performance of a venture. The research design used was

descriptive, analytical, and cross-sectional, and data were gathered about 166 women entrepreneurs

who run digitally enabled businesses in India. Respondent profiling, descriptive statistics,

reliability/test-validity testing, Pearson correlation, and multiple regression were all part of the

analysis. The results can be interpreted as the moderate involvement of respondents in digital tools,

online platforms, and fintech systems, but they do not seem to be highly transformational but rather

operational. The results of hypothesis-testing indicate that there was not a significant positive impact

on perceived venture performance as a result of digital capability, nor was there a significant negative

impact on socio-cultural barriers. However more importantly, the measurement model had weak

reliability and validity and the inference is that before robust inferences can be made, there is need to

refine the instrument to give a high degree of reliability and validity. This paper concludes that women

entrepreneurs are now partially digitally included: they are active digitally and partially digital support

positive, but the degree of digital engagement is not a guarantee of more successful venture

performance. The study demonstrates the topicality of this issue and the necessity to develop more

efficient research instruments in the future.