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Abstract

This study challenges the narrative of e-commerce’s potential for empowering women in the Global South by exploring the structural barriers that women entrepreneurs face in Indonesia, both as paid and unpaid workers. The study also challenges the notion of “techno-optimism,” which suggests that digital entrepreneurship inherently empowers women, by highlighting the obstacles women face in economic engagement due to a “second shift” of domestic labor. Through a systematic review and bibliometric analysis of 158 articles indexed in Scopus and Web of Science, we map the intellectual structure of the literature on e-commerce and the financial performance of micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in Indonesia. The analysis reveals two forms of marginalization: (1) Indonesia’s underrepresentation in global academic discourse and (2) a misalignment in the research between theory and practice stemming from the under-politicization of gender in this context. Seven thematic clusters emerged from the bibliometric and content analyses, suggesting that gender is treated as an antecedent rather than a modifier in the literature. Moreover, the unpaid care work that is central to women’s economic engagement is absent from the discourse on digital entrepreneurship. To remedy these gaps, this research proposes a moderated mediation model, with digital dynamic capabilities as the mediator and gender as the omnibus moderator, to filter the direct and indirect pathways in which women’s initial resources affect their performance in MSMEs. Our model combines resource-based view theory (RBV), dynamic capabilities view theory (DCV), and social role theory (SRT) within an antecedent-mediation/moderation-outcome statistical structure to close the bibliometric gap and offer a new perspective on the concept of entrepreneurial success coinciding with family well-being. The dual burden of unpaid care work creates time poverty for the women, given that pathways to wellbeing include resource-to-capabilities and capabilities-to-family. The proposed model includes institutional care support as a boundary condition and presents five propositions to test the moderated mediation model for future research on women’s digital entrepreneurship. The work also challenges readers to consider the limitations of technological optimism and the need for a more tailored approach to women’s empowerment in the Global South.

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