Annual review article: Is it time to rethink the gender agenda in entrepreneurship research?

This article develops a critique of contemporary approaches to analysing the impact of gender upon entrepreneurial propensity and activity. Since the 1990s, increasing attention has been afforded to the influence of gender upon women’s entrepreneurial behaviour; such analyses have highlighted an embedded masculinity within the entrepreneurial discourse which privileges men as normative entrepreneurial actors. Whilst invaluable in revealing a prevailing bias which portrays women in deficit as entrepreneurial actors, their critique is limited in that they tend to position women as a proxy for the gendered subject. Analyses that fail to recognise gender as a human property with myriad articulations not only homogenise women as a category, but also ignore how gender manifests in all entrepreneurial phenomena. To progress debate, we engage more deeply with the notion of gender as a multiplicity by recognising its diversity and considering the implications of such for future studies of entrepreneurial activity.