Gendered Entrepreneurship: Women, Inequality & Business

Introduction: Defining Gendered Entrepreneurship

To be an entrepreneur, one must endure multiple hardships. These hardships define people as leaders or failures. In recent decades, women have started businesses despite facing gender inequality, leading to significant growth in the number of women entrepreneurs in a predominantly male-dominated field. However, while women's entrepreneurship has grown, persistent inequalities and entrenched social views have given rise to the assumption that entrepreneurship may still be gendered — that is, society views only men as the primary breadwinners and as capable of the effective leadership that entrepreneurs embody. This paper supports that assumption and provides evidence of gendered entrepreneurship, while also examining literature that argues against it, demonstrating the potential for the gender gap to narrow in the future.

To understand the potential of gendered entrepreneurship, one must first define it. Gendered entrepreneurship is a hypothesis that considers entrepreneurship to follow gendered patterns. The UK was among the first to provide gender-specific statistics demonstrating that both gender orders and gender systems exist in all spheres, including the third sector (Lundstrom, 2013, p. 287). While such data may not dictate how individuals within the business world feel about women entrepreneurs, it does reveal certain patterns. For instance, women across the globe are paid less than men (Lundstrom, 2013). The wage gap has not closed even in countries like the United States and England.

Further exploring the meaning of gendered entrepreneurship requires examining how women perceive entrepreneurship itself. A 2006 article by Lewis suggests women entrepreneurs tend to see entrepreneurship as gender-neutral while simultaneously viewing it as part of the masculine norm. "By considering the way in which some women business owners not only treat entrepreneurship as gender-neutral, but also seek to conceal its gendered nature, we can see how some women entrepreneurs are trying to avoid being identified as different from the masculine norm of entrepreneurship" (Lewis, 2006, p. 453). This appears contradictory. If women entrepreneurs regard entrepreneurship as gender-neutral, why do they simultaneously attempt to prevent others from perceiving them as deviating from the masculine norm?

Entrepreneurial Identity and the Masculine Norm

There could be several reasons for this. First, businesses have been run by men for many years. It was not until recently that the world witnessed women leaders in business, politics, and other male-dominated arenas. With no established female precedent to draw upon, women entrepreneurs must rely on already available information and merge it with their knowledge of the differences they experience and observe daily. Lewis explores this merging of information in a 2013 article on entrepreneurial identity:

"Drawing on Charme's notion of existential authenticity, which places an emphasis on the cultural, historical, political, economic and physical limits to being 'true to oneself', the article shows how the situated nature of women's search for an authentically driven entrepreneurial identity means that they draw on a feminised discourse of difference and a contrasting masculine discourse of professionalism in their identity construction labours" (Lewis, 2013, p. 252).

Essentially, Lewis argues that women attempt to unite their awareness of gender differences with the accepted masculine ideal of business in order to create and assume their own entrepreneurial identity.

Entrepreneurial identity remains a critical aspect of being an entrepreneur. It is not simply about becoming a leader or assuming responsibility — an entrepreneur must think, behave, and present themselves in a particular way. Because women entrepreneurs are a relatively recent phenomenon, women can only base their understanding of what an entrepreneur is on male models. This itself constitutes a form of gendered entrepreneurship: women must learn to emulate men to gain a firm understanding of what it means to be an entrepreneur.

As the future unfolds and more women assume the role of entrepreneur, future generations of potential women entrepreneurs will look to these role models and develop their own entrepreneurial identities. Whether those identities include archaic masculine archetypes remains to be seen. In the present, however, that female entrepreneurial foundation is not yet fully established. Women wishing to enter the business world must do so with the information and role models that today's societies and cultures provide. As noted, today's society has moved progressively toward gender equality, but at a slow pace.

Women's Business Performance and Persistent Stereotypes

What does this "slow rate" of progress mean in practice? Women are not paid as much as men. Their businesses are generally less expansive and less profitable than men's, and women are consistently perceived as needing assistance due to the social constructs attached to the image of "woman." "What is consistently shown, however, is that women's businesses are smaller than men's are, they are less profitable and they do not grow as rapidly. Whatever we call masculine or feminine is something of our own making" (Jonson Ahl, 2005, pp. 54–55). While research shows that male and female entrepreneurs perform at relatively similar levels, the image of women as feminine and therefore weak persists.

Society still views women as the weaker sex and therefore as less capable. Women are still mistreated and objectified rather than respected as professionals. Not all men hold this view, but those who do — often men in positions of power — continue to influence and control the work environment for women. If powerful men still harbor negative beliefs about women in the workplace, it is difficult to argue that meaningful progress has been achieved to a level where prejudice is nonexistent.

Women must contend with a millennium or more of societal norms dictating what is feminine and masculine, and who occupies each category. This leads to the assumption that women entrepreneurs cannot perform as well as their male counterparts, or that they require assistance. Literature pointing toward women entrepreneurs achieving lower levels of success than male entrepreneurs — even when performance is roughly equal — seems to reinforce notions of weakness and fragility. In reality, women entrepreneurs often lack the connections, funding, and family capital that many male entrepreneurs benefit from when establishing a business. That said, recent news coverage notes that millennial women entrepreneurs are earning more than the women before them, suggesting some progress is occurring.

Conclusion: The Road to Entrepreneurial Equality

In conclusion, women entrepreneurs have gained solid ground in developing profitable, sustainable businesses. These women have laid — and continue to lay — the foundation for future women entrepreneurs to succeed as business leaders. Although recent progress has demonstrated that women can lead effectively in business, launch their own companies, and thrive in male-dominated sectors, there is still a long way to go before women entrepreneurs achieve genuine equality. There are several core reasons for this.

The first is the persistence of gender stereotypes. Society perceives women as feminine and men as masculine, and it perceives leaders as masculine. For society to regard women as equal to men, these beliefs must change. Leaders should be understood as gender-neutral, embodying both masculine and feminine qualities — a reflection of the reality that all people possess both. This transformation, however, takes time, because inequalities between men and women remain widespread.

The second reason is the ongoing wage gap. While women have assumed powerful political positions in both developed and developing nations, women are still paid less than men throughout the world, in virtually every country. Compounding this are growing political efforts to restrict women's reproductive rights and the influence of extreme religious movements, both of which have set back women's equality in recent years. Women are still not viewed as equals across most cultures and countries.

The third reason is that women in currently male-dominated environments must contend with ongoing sexual harassment, sexual assault, and limited promotional opportunities — all of which reduce their likelihood of advancement, as detailed in the Goldman Sachs example. Some progress has been made, with some companies appointing female CEOs, but the majority of executive positions and workplace cultures continue to favor the advancement of men. Adding the wage gap to these structural disadvantages, there remains an enormous amount of work to be done to achieve equality and, by extension, a gender-neutral image of entrepreneurship.

It is fair to say that entrepreneurship remains gendered. Should women's equality reach a level that provides genuinely equal rights for women across the world, gendered entrepreneurship will become a thing of the past. Until then, a pervasive culture of misogyny and negative stereotyping continues to shape the business world — especially as it concerns women leaders and women entrepreneurs. Gendered entrepreneurship exists, and it will continue to exist for years to come.

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