Year: 2018
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: Threat damage that a gender-blind and/or gender-neutral approach can do to both male and female students and have argued for gender to be foregrounded in EntEd (see Jones, 2014 and 2015).Gendered notions create a template of the ideal entrepreneur, linked to practical or vocational outcomes and to developing an entrepreneurial mind-set; a mind-set that has been criticised as highly masculinised (Ahl, 2002;Ahl and Marlow, 2012;Jones 2015).Traditional EntEd also reifies particular activities and behaviours and is arguably institutionalised as a belief system in universities (Farny, et al, 2016).Lewis (2006) describes how decisions to keep gender out of a particular domain can result in a gender-blindness which suggests neutrality, but which reproduces the masculine norm of entrepreneurship.However, bringing gender in may also reinforce negative gendered perceptions of 'deficient entrepreneurial femininity' in relation to 'efficient entrepreneurial masculinity'.Both approaches run the risk of perpetuating suggested essentialist differences between men and women.'Efficient entrepreneurial masculinity' may feel as tight and uncomfortable to some as 'deficient entrepreneurial femininity', emphasising behaviours and attitudes that women must change in order to be deemed successful (Bird and Brush, 2002; Ahl, 2006;Hughes et al, 2012).If gendered orders are interpreted as an individual shortcoming this may also result in a requirement for individuals to change to adapt to the gendered entrepreneurship order, rather than changing this order.Such concerns have led to calls for feminist approaches to entrepreneurship research (Ahl and Marlow, 2012;Calas et al, 2009;Henry et al, 2016).Thus creating awareness for how to address the gendered entrepreneurship discourse requires reflection.This chapter outlines a critical feminist approach to teaching, which draws upon critiques of entrepreneurship research and experiences of bringing these debates into the classroom.
Author: Simon Jones
Language: English
Subfield: Gender Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3113700953