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TopThe Story Of Subha
A postgraduate student from NIFT Delhi, Subha worked with a retail ethnic brand for three years and realised how people had switched to Western outfits and how the Sari (an apparel worn by Indian women) was losing its appeal. She founded HATHKARGHA (meaning Handloom), an initiative to bring handpicked pieces from across Indian states to customers through her own website and mobile App. She confides that it is the power of the internet and the cyber world that has made possible the dreams of many others like her to materialize.
These are not just stories of Richa and Subha, but many other female entrepreneurs who have leveraged the agility benefits of cyberspace and the digital platforms (Salmela et al., 2022) to paint the entrepreneurial sky with bold strokes of pink. Opening up a world of opportunities, digital platforms have helped female entrepreneurs overcome many of the traditional barriers they faced in the business world (Duan et al., 2021). Consequently, a growing number of women are now opting to launch their own innovative enterprises, challenging the traditional breadwinner-caregiving model (Azmat & Fujimoto, 2016; Sajjad et al., 2020). Providing increased access to customers (Hair et al., 2012), reduced costs (Sussan & Acs, 2017), improved flexibility (Nambisan, 2017), access to resources (Camacho & Barrios, 2022), and enhanced speed of business scaling (Rialp-Criado & Rialp, 2020) among other things, digital entrepreneurship is now presented in popular discourse as a means to empowerment. However, it is important to note that there exists gender disparities in digital entrepreneurship, and women may face unique challenges such as online gender-based violence, lack of access to digital infrastructure and skills, and limited representation in tech-related fields (Dy, 2022; Luo & Chan, 2021). On one hand, digital platforms have helped to level the playing field for women entrepreneurs, giving them the resources they need to succeed in the business world. On the other hand, however, the reinforcement of gendered disadvantages and misogyny continues even on digital platforms. This leads to a state of indecisiveness regarding the potential of digital entrepreneurship to emancipate women from the shackles of historical stereotyping and vulnerabilities.