Digital entrepreneurship education and technology-facilitated gender-based violence: Rethinking safe innovation spaces in schools
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: The rapid expansion of digital technologies in education has significantly transformed entrepreneurship education, enabling students to participate in innovation-driven learning through online collaboration platforms, virtual business simulations, digital marketplaces, and technology-mediated project-based activities. While these developments have broadened opportunities for creativity, collaboration, and entrepreneurial skill development, they have also introduced new risks within digital learning environments, including the emergence of technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV). Existing research on TFGBV has largely focused on cyberbullying, online harassment, and social media interactions among adolescents; however, limited scholarly attention has been directed to how digital entrepreneurship education spaces may inadvertently reproduce gendered harms through technology-mediated collaboration, competition, and public digital engagement. This conceptual paper critically examines the intersection between digital entrepreneurship education and TFGBV in school contexts, arguing that innovation-oriented learning environments can unintentionally create conditions in which gendered exclusion, harassment, reputational harm, and other forms of technology-facilitated abuse may occur. Drawing on intersectionality theory, digital citizenship frameworks, and contemporary perspectives on entrepreneurship education, the paper reconceptualises digital innovation spaces in schools not only as sites of entrepreneurial skill development but also as socio-technological environments shaped by power relations, gender dynamics, and digital behavioural norms. The paper analyses how common pedagogical practices in digital entrepreneurship education, including online pitching platforms, collaborative startup simulations, digital prototyping, and virtual innovation competitions, may expose learners, particularly girls and young women, to forms of TFGBV. In response, the paper proposes a conceptual model for Safe Digital Innovation Ecosystems in entrepreneurship education, integrating gender-sensitive pedagogy, digital ethics, teacher facilitation, and institutional safeguards as key mechanisms for preventing TFGBV within school-based innovation environments.
Author: Peter Isaac Msughter
Institution: University of South Africa
Language: English
Subfield: Gender Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7168140636