Theoretical trends
The association among gender, women, entrepreneurial propensity, new venture creation and business ownership has been recognised in mainstream theorising since the latter part of the twentieth century (Henry, Foss and Ahl, 2015). On one hand, it emerged in conjunction with an increased interest in entrepreneurial behaviour and activity as an individualised socio-economic approach reflecting the growth of contemporary neo-liberalism (du Gay, 2004; Goss, 2005; Jones and Spicer, 2009). On the other hand, it should be recognised that entrepreneurial women were not suddenly produced by this research âgazeâ, which increasingly illuminated their experiences beginning in the late 1980s. On the contrary, women have been active entrepreneurs throughout history; for example, in the British context they dominated the brewing trade of the fourteenth century, were renowned speculators during the emergence of capital markets in the seventeenth century and have undertaken a critical role in family enterprises over history (Kay, 2012; Herbert and Link, 2012; Marlow and Swail, 2014). Thus, entrepreneurial women are not a new phenomenon; however, the manner in which gender influences and constrains such activities is of more recent interest for the reasons described above.
When reviewing this field, there has been a notable shift in the sophistication of prevailing debate as the emphasis has moved from women as deficient entrepreneurs to critical feminist analyses of the influence of gender upon perceptions and practices of entrepreneurship (Henry et al., 2015). As such, we can see change in the unit of analysis within extant research over time; so, prior to the mid-2000s, the overwhelming focus was almost exclusively upon an individual womanâs experiences of business ownership, generally articulated as explorations of female entrepreneurship (see Mirchandani, 1999, and Marlow, 2002, as exceptions). As the unit of analysis within the debate was the woman herself, her perception of entrepreneurship as a career option and her approach to managing her business were of critical interest. The field of entrepreneurship â how it was represented, researched and interpreted â was tacitly presumed to be a neutral activity or, in other words, a meritocratic site of agentic activity available and accessible to all. The hegemonic masculinity of the phenomenon was rendered invisible (Ahl, 2006). In taking this ontological stance, structural issues such as gender-related disadvantages constraining access to entrepreneurial resources, labour market segmentation (channelling women towards lower-order service-sector start-ups) and domestic responsibilities (resulting in a greater propensity for part-time home-based firms) were confused with agentic deficiencies. This confusion was exacerbated by the tendency to use sex as a variable such that the entrepreneurial activities of men and women were compared across a range of performance indicators, with women inevitably positioned in deficit such that their enterprises were condemned as smaller than, weaker than, lacking growth orientation or pejoratively dismissed as home-based, part-time, or life-style businesses (Ahl, 2006; Ahl and Marlow, 2012; Marlow and McAdam, 2013). It is a maxim well observed that almost every detrimental business term has been visited upon the hapless female entrepreneur to explain her alleged deficiencies as a business owner/manager (Marlow, Carter and Shaw, 2009). To treat female entrepreneurs as deficient in this way was problematic as it confused sex (a biological category) with gender (a social construction that devalues femininity and, ergo, women) and reproduced gendered stereotypes when associating typical small-firm performance profiles (marginal, volatile and growth averse) with female deficiency.
The assumption that arose from this body of research, reflecting the epistemological presumption of female deficiency, was that women needed âfixingâ. As Taylor and Marlow (2009: 1) conclude, the underpinning subtext rests upon the notion of âwhy canât a woman be more like a man?â and relatedly, âwhat can be done to make this happenâ. This liberal feminist agenda assumed a male template to which women should aspire, and this argument was replicated in emerging policy directives. Thus, reports such as that published by the United Kingdom Small Business Service (2003) advocated addressing female deficiencies such as risk aversion, lack of confidence and poor entrepreneurial orientation through dedicated support and advice to enable more women to create new ventures and so contribute to national and personal socio-economic growth. This debate encompassed almost an evangelical moral tone inciting women to develop an entrepreneurial spirit in order to exploit their potential and so create new ventures that in turn would generate employment and economic growth and offer a social welfare contribution to society (Small Business Service, 2003).
The prevailing focus upon the agentic essence of entrepreneurship was subject to increasing scrutiny in the early 2000s; thus, critical work by Ogbor (2000) and Ahl (2006) raised a number of challenges to orthodox theorising. Analysing institutional and discourse biases, each author drew attention to the socially constructed processual nature of entrepreneurship and in particular how this privileged certain subjects as idealised normative entrepreneurs. As such, Ogbor raised a broad critique of the entrepreneurial field and particularly the failure of prevailing literature to recognise the institutional biases embedded within the discourse in that ascribed characteristics such as race, class and gender inherently shape how entrepreneurship is accessed, understood and enacted. Ahl (2006) developed a post-structural feminist critique that questioned the alleged gender-neutrality of the entrepreneurial discourse. She argued that entrepreneurship is embedded in masculinity; the textual representation of the entrepreneur is inevitably male, which, in turn, positions women as outsiders or intruders to this field. However, as Ahl points out, much of the extant literature drawn from the âgender as a variableâ approach actually failed to find many significant differences between men and women firm owners. Yet, given embedded gendered assumptions, the quest for difference persisted (and persists) with small variations exaggerated to satisfy social expectations of male dominance and female deficit (see Kepler and Shane, 2007; Klapper and Parker, 2011).
A more theoretically informed debate has since emerged to challenge notions of entrepreneurship as a gender-neutral meritocracy and women as deficit actors (de Bruin et al., 2007; CalĂĄs et al., 2007; Marlow and Patton, 2005). This analytical shift to gendering entrepreneurship (Gherardi, 2015) rather than separating and categorising women as problematic entrepreneurs marked greater engagement with theoretical criticism rather than the previous focus upon descriptive comment. The theoretical debate and repository of empirical evidence pertaining to gender, women and entrepreneurship has clearly grown in terms of complexity and substance over a relatively short period of time (McAdam, 2012). We have moved from a focus upon the individual woman and her supposed entrepreneurial deficiencies with research defined by small samples and atheoretical description (Carter and Shaw, 2006) to more sophisticated analyses centred upon gender and how this generates broader socio-economic disadvantages for women â including entrepreneurial activity (Henry et al., 2015). In turn, this debate has been increasingly informed by feminist theory to analyse and explain how women fit into the contemporary entrepreneurial turn whilst challenging the ontological and epistemological assumptions underpinning entrepreneurship discourse (Ahl and Marlow, 2012).
However, denotations of gender remain a proxy for femininity (Kelan, 2009). As such, ...
