Am I an Entrepreneur? Identity Struggle in the Contemporary Women Entrepreneurship Discourse

Abstract

Despite extensive research into their identity, women entrepreneurs still struggle to identify themselves as entrepreneurs and encounter role models. This study shows that one explanation for this struggle is misalignment in the discourses on women entrepreneurs’ identity. Misalignments and fragmentations in discourses on identity prevent women entrepreneurs from finding discursive material with which to lay solid foundations for the social construction of their identity. By comparing and contrasting the academic discourse with the discourse from interviews with women entrepreneurs between 2012 and 2017, this study provides evidence that the discourses on women entrepreneurs’ identity are misaligned. This misalignment may depend on the tendency in academia to address gaps in the literature and devote less attention to revisiting, in new empirical contexts, issues that have been considered in prior studies. This study also highlights several issues that are framed in widely divergent ways in the two discourses. The presence of several such misalignments helps explain current difficulties that women encounter in identifying themselves as entrepreneurs.