A Road to Empowerment: Social Media Usage by Women Entrepreneurs in China
$ 32.5
Description
Women’s entrepreneurship is on the rise globally. In the past few years, 163 million women were starting businesses across 74 economies worldwide, while 111 million were running established businesses, according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) 2016/2017 Women’s Report (GEM, 2017). Numerous studies throughout the world have consistently demonstrated the positive effect of women entrepreneurs on economic growth, job creation as well as social benefits, particularly in developing economies (Cuberes and Teignier, 2015; Fetsch et al., 2015; Lewis et al., 2014; Hailemariam et al., 2019). A point in case is China, China has one of the largest populations in the world, with a population of 1.4 billion and of which 48.7 per cent is accounted by women (worldbank.org, 2019). Until recently, female entrepreneurs were mostly unheard of in China’s business environment largely due to cultural barriers and the dominant male-focused society, as noted by Lai (2017). However, the rise of online and social media platforms (WeChat and Weibo) is offering huge potential with minimum cost and is offering huge potential to empower Chinese female entrepreneurs globally.