Several decades of research show that women are critical to the social and economic development of society. Women’s role in families and communities enables them to act as catalysts for education reform, poverty reduction, and social stability—all of which are interrelated and necessary for thriving societies (Boserup and Kanji, 2007; Mayo, 1977; Heintz, 2006). The contributions of women to social and political movements, education reform, and business development also demonstrate their stabilizing influence.

The role of women in economic development has also received much attention in the scholarly literature. Frietsch et al.(2009), for example, articulate that the mobilization of female human capital is one of the best ways to improve national competitiveness and the quality of a knowledgebased society. Following Davidsson (2004), women represent a theoretically unique population of entrepreneurs, thus their economic contributions are likely dependent on a number of unique elements. Failure to understand how mediating conditions and factors differ between men and women may, according to Langowitz and Minniti (2007), result in the underutilization of women’s human capital, therefore perpetuating lower living standards and reinforcing costly and ineffective policies. This chapter explores the challenges and opportunities associated with the role of women in academic entrepreneurship, an area of particular interest to scholars and policymakers alike (Jennings and Brush, 2013). We define academic entrepreneurship as the establishment of new spinoff companies by faculty, students, and other higher education staff based on new technologies derived from university research (Hayter et al., 2016). A deep and emergent literature shows that academic entrepreneurship