Abstract

Over the last three decades, Bangladesh has made substantial progress in economic growth and social development. In this development achievement, the role of women’s involvement in economic activities cannot be overemphasized. Female labour force participation has increased significantly, and women’s presence is visible in almost all sectors of the economy. However, the Covid-19 pandemic has adversely affected the economy of Bangladesh on many fronts. The biggest concern is rising unemployment, and wage cuts have become a regular phenomenon in all formal and informal job sectors. Even though both men and women lose their jobs because of the pandemic, the impact on women is much worse since they mainly depend on male members for their livelihoods. The involvement of women in entrepreneurial activities has increased in recent decades. However, the magnitude and momentum of women’s entrepreneurship are still shallow. Moreover, women entrepreneurs face many barriers when planning a new business. Against this backdrop, this paper aims to identify the push and pull factors which influence a woman to become an entrepreneur. For this, 41 women entrepreneurs were interviewed using a structured questionnaire for running a Principal component analysis (PCA).  Findings    of the study show that ‘Family Hardship’ is the main push factor and ‘Self- Employment and Economic Freedom’, and ‘Strong willpower to do something on own’ are the primary pull factors. Moreover, according to our PCA result,  ‘ financial support from the government’ could be a dominant pull factor. Based on the result, this study recommends that only financial support from the government is not enough for the development of women’s    entrepreneurship. Instead, building an entrepreneurial ecosystem for women is very important, encouraging more women to unleash their immense potential entrepreneurial capabilities