Contextual Embeddedness of Women's Entrepreneurship

20 Beyond the gender-neutral approach

Gender and entrepreneurship as an intertwined social practice

Silvia Gherardi and Barbara Poggio

Although the literature on women entrepreneurship has grown rapidly since 1990, its focus on individual women and their businesses does not explain current patterns of women’s entrepreneurship because its basic assumptions position women as inadequate and incomplete entrepreneurs, while there is scant empirical evidence of such underperformance (Mirchandani, 1999; Marlow & McAdam, 2013). This literature has been mainly gender blind, positivistic and in danger of reaching a dead end in the absence of a reflexive critical perspective informing the idea of who can be and what might be an entrepreneur (Ahl & Marlow, ...