Maheran Zakaria, Mohd Arpi Arifin, Muhammad Saiful Anuar Yusoff, Eka Nurmala Sari, Nor Balkish Zakaria
Women have been discriminated against in all spheres of lives including education, employment, political representation and economy. Indeed, they are persistently overshadowed by men. Turning women into successful entrepreneurs is amongst the strategies in empowering women and reducing gender inequality. In realizing the strategies, abundances of programs on women entrepreneurship have been adopted by many countries of emerging economies including Malaysia. Despite the vast amount of public monies spent by the government on those programs, a dearth of them has succeeded. Hence, what makes them successful needs to be investigated. Emulating Social Cognitive Theory and prior literature, the objective of this study is to predict the antecedent factors of women entrepreneurs' success concerning self-efficacy, technology usage, virtue ethics and social support. A total of 500 questionnaires were randomly distributed to women entrepreneurs of a Malaysian microcredit provider. Approximately 384 borrowers responded, but only 347 were usable for analysis. Data were analyzed using Smart PLS version 3. Results indicated that all the predicted factors were significantly related to women entrepreneurs' success. Self-efficacy obtained the highest magnitude of effect, followed by technology usage, virtue ethics and social support. The results provide competent insight to policymakers, microcredit providers, academia and the like in a quest of predicting the factors of women entrepreneurs' success. Hence, incorporating these factors in formulating national policies and strategies is hoped to realize the aspirations of the sustainable development goal of the united nation to empower women and reduce gender inequality by 2030.