Proceedings of 7th Annual American Business Research Conference
23 - 24 July 2015, Sheraton LaGuardia East Hotel, New York, USA, ISBN: 978-1-922069-79-5
Barriers, Enablers and Strategies for Malaysian Women’s
Economic Participation through SMEs
Indra Devi Subramaniam* and Tanusia Arumugam**
Since the last decade, although the total numbers of women involving themselves in
business venture have increased, the women’s economic empowerment in Malaysia is
relatively low despite the country’s strong economy. This is because many of women’s
businesses are in the informal sector. Greater economic empowerment can only happen
when they participate in the formal sector. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to identify
barriers and enablers to women’s economic participation through entrepreneurship in the
formal sector more specifically in Small and Medium Enterprises. This paper describes
the first stage of the study, which is, identifying the barriers and enablers. The study
relates women’s economic participation to Malaysia’s vision 2020 and its aspirations to
be fully developed high income nation. The Delphi Technique is used to identify both
barriers and enablers.
*Assoc. Prof. Dr. Indra Devi Subramaniam, Graduate School of Management, Multimedia University,
Cyberjaya, Malaysia. Email: indra@mmu.edu.my
**Tanusia Arumugam, Graduate School of Management, Multimedia University, Cyberjaya, Malaysia.
Email: sakura_tanu@yahoo.com