Female entrepreneurship in tourism: an island perspective

Often described as a fertile field for entrepreneurial endeavours, tourism empowers women by providing them with income generating opportunities through small and medium enterprises. The objectives of this chapter are three-fold. Firstly, it explores which factors drive the individual entrepreneurial orientation of women to achieve a tourism entrepreneurship propensity which has been an under researched area in tourism. Secondly, this chapter probes into femineity as a concept and examines the influence of femineity on gender-based cognition. Tourism entrepreneurs contribute massively to the socio-economic development of a country and being a small island developing state, Mauritius is not exempt from this reality. Given the difficult economic context brought by the COVID 19 pandemic and a radical drop in the number of tourists visiting the island, will the passion of female Mauritian tourism entrepreneurs help them overcome these unprecedented challenges?