Abstract

Recently, women entrepreneurship has become of particular interest to corporate social responsibility (CSR) scholarship, however, little is known about the impact of crises on women’s business activities and how they adapt to the disruptions and new market realities caused by a crisis. To design CSR initiatives that genuinely cater to the needs of women entrepreneurs, it is imperative to acquire an in-depth understanding of their unique experiences during times of crisis. This study employed a qualitative methodology to investigate the development of resilience among women entrepreneurs amidst crisis. The study sample comprised Iranian women entrepreneurs who were operating health-related businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to challenges related to money, market, management, motherhood, macro and meso level factors, women entrepreneurs were found to face crisis related challenges such as emotional exhaustion, altruism, fear of failure and uncertainty. Additionally, the findings revealed the different problem-based and emotion-based coping strategies (e.g., bootstrapping and emotional regulation) that women entrepreneurs used to build entrepreneurial resilience as well as business resilience. The resultant findings offer a comprehensive understanding of women entrepreneurs’ resilience-building process and suggest that resilience-building is a contextual as well as a gendered phenomenon. Implications for entrepreneurship research as well as women entrepreneurship and ethics literature is discussed.