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While women’s entrepreneurship is widely recognized as a source of economic and social development, there is a persistent storyline that women entrepreneurs do not perform as well as their male counterparts, and research examining performance and growth shows inconclusive results regarding gender differences in performance and the causes of them. This introduction chapter defines programs, policies, and practices, and explains why they matter for understanding and stimulating higher levels of growth among women’s businesses. This chapter provides an outline for the book that is organized about three key themes that emerged from the research produced by the collaborators in this book: the practice of building networks, programs and the support environment, and policies and regulations. These three themes comprise the elements of our new framework for policies, programs and practices for high-growth women’s entrepreneurship.

It is over half a century since the first sex discrimination laws were enacted. No doubt the women who fought during the 1960s and 1970s, for equality of pay and opportunity, would have imagined a fairer world than the one we find ourselves in today. There are certainly some areas where improvements have been made. More women make it to middle management levels, and many formal barriers preventing women from reaching the top levels in organizations have been removed. Yet as Chapter 10 (Burkinshaw and White) demonstrates, for those women who do make it to the highest levels within their occupations, fitting in with male-dominated cultures can be challenging. According to Chapter 12 (Antoniou and Aggelou) social and gender stereotypes still dictate the way female managers ought to behave and the ones who defy them often face multiple consequences. And as Gatrell and Peyton (Chapter 18) observe some mechanisms barring women from career advancement have remained firmly in place until the present decade.