article · Multidisciplinary Reviews
Mentorship is widely regarded as vital for the participation and success of women entrepreneurs, yet academic research on the subject remains fragmented and geographically uneven. An analysis of 621 peer-reviewed articles published between 2000 and 2025 reveals that most existing literature originates from the Global North, particularly the United States and the United Kingdom. Developing areas, including Sub-Saharan Africa, remain under-represented in the scholarly record. Research themes frequently cluster around coaching, capacity building, and broader entrepreneurial ecosystems, showing that mentorship is rarely evaluated as an independent mechanism. To address conceptual gaps, a Gendered Social Capital and Learning framework is introduced to better explain how mentorship operates. The resulting mapping highlights critical deficits in regional and theoretical coverage, providing an evidence base for more inclusive, contextually tailored support programmes.
Mentorship initiatives frequently rely on models designed for high-income nations that may not function effectively in other settings. By identifying geographic and thematic blind spots in current knowledge, this work helps practitioners and policymakers understand where evidence is lacking. It enables the design of enterprise support systems that reflect local conditions, particularly for female business owners in under-researched regions like Sub-Saharan Africa.
This work represents early-stage conceptual research that does not offer a direct commercial product. However, enterprise support organisations, incubators, and business development practitioners can use its proposed framework and findings to design and refine tailored mentorship programmes for female founders. Applying these insights to operational business support schemes remains in an early, formative phase, requiring local contextualisation and practical testing before widespread implementation.
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Mentorship is increasingly recognised as a critical enabler of women’s entrepreneurial participation and success. However, existing scholarship remains fragmented, conceptually inconsistent, and unevenly distributed across global contexts. This study conducts a bibliometric analysis of mentorship in women’s entrepreneurship, examining peer-reviewed literature published between 2000 and 2025 globally. To enhance methodological robustness and address limitations associated with narrow keyword selection, a multi-stage search strategy was employed using the Scopus database. A total of 878 records were identified through the Scopus database. The final dataset includes 621 articles, allowing for a detailed analysis of publication trends, geographic distribution, authorship patterns, and thematic development within the field. The findings reveal a significant concentration of research output in the Global North, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom, with comparatively limited representation from developing regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa. Thematic analysis indicates strong clustering around mentorship, coaching, entrepreneurial ecosystems, and capacity building, highlighting both conceptual convergence and fragmentation. Furthermore, the results show that mentorship is frequently embedded within broader entrepreneurial support frameworks rather than examined as a standalone construct. In response, this study advances a Gendered Social Capital and Learning framework to provide a more integrated understanding of mentorship processes in women’s entrepreneurship. The study contributes to the literature by offering a robust, data-driven overview of the field, identifying key gaps in geographic and theoretical coverage, and highlighting the methodological implications of keyword selection in bibliometric research. The findings provide valuable insights for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners seeking to design more inclusive and contextually relevant mentorship interventions for women entrepreneurs.
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DOI: 10.31893/multirev.2027106
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