Entrepreneurial Empowerment through the Internet: A Qualitative Research on Chinese Women Entrepreneurs

This qualitative study sought to explore how women entrepreneurs leverage the Internet to empower their entrepreneurial activities in the Chinese context. To this end, we first conducted semi-structured interviews with 30 women entrepreneurs, and then analyzed their transcripts by following the principles of thematic analysis from grounded theory method. After the three-phase coding procedure, we developed a conceptual model of Internet use of women entrepreneurs which were composed of Internet marketing, Internet purchasing, and Internet learning. The current study provides the first evidence for the multidimensional construct of Internet use with a sample of women entrepreneurs in China. A hypothesis concerning the relationship between Internet use and women entrepreneurial performance is proposed for future investigation. Implications for women entrepreneurs and policymakers are discussed. With the proliferation of digital technologies, an increasing number of women entrepreneurs leverage the Internet to run their businesses. But how do women entrepreneurs incorporate the Internet into their businesses in ways that make them feel empowered? In this article, we investigate this question by conducting semi-structured interviews with 30 Chinese female entrepreneurs and analyzing their transcripts via grounded theory method. Results show that the conceptual model of Internet use from a lens of female entrepreneurs encompasses Internet marketing, Internet purchasing, and Internet learning, which constitutes our major contribution to the literature on women entrepreneurship. We hypothesize that these Internet use has the potential to improve the entrepreneurial performance of women and recommend further studies in this regard. Based on our findings, we provide policymakers with suggestions to digitally empower women entrepreneurs, and offer women entrepreneurs implications on the effective use of new digital technologies. However, since all the interviewees came from China, the dimensions of Internet use identified in our article may not be applicable to women entrepreneurs in other cultural contexts with different digital environments.