'Surfing on the ironing board' – the representation of women's entrepreneurship in German newspapers

The Gendering of Entrepreneurship Context

“…Research, studying entrepreneurial metaphors for Scandinavian countries where the environment generally is more favourable for female entrepreneurship, illustrates that even in the late 1990s, women still assign controversial and negative metaphors to entrepreneurship, whilst men frequently emphasised idealising aspects (Hyrsky, 1999). By portraying women's entrepreneurship (or the general labour market participation of women) as less desirable, traditional gender norms affect self-perceptions of women (Achtenhagen & Welter, 2011;Brush, De Bruin, & Welter, 2009;Eikhof, Summers, & Carter, 2013). In this respect, Baughn et al (2006) suggest that women appear more responsive to the level of normative support for entrepreneurship compared to men.…”

Female Entrepreneurship and the Metanarrative of Economic Growth: A Critical Review of Underlying Assumptions

“…In all entrepreneurship studies, regardless of gender, business performance is equated with and evaluated in terms of economic growth variables, notably sales turnover, number of employees and profitability (Carter and Shaw 2006;Welter et al 2017). The belief that female entrepreneurs underperform in comparison with their male counterparts in relation to these economic measures dominates media coverage and scholarly articles (Achtenhagen and Welter 2011;Baker et al 1997). Marlow and McAdam (2013a) and Marlow et al (2009) highlight the frequent association between female entrepreneurs' businesses and the notion of underperformance.…”

The Gendering of Entrepreneurship on Reality Television

“…This research attempts to respond to calls from scholars for new approaches that better contextualize gender disparities as they relate to entrepreneurial outcomes, identification with the concept, and choice of activities (Welter, Brush, and De Bruin 2014). Entrepreneurship scholars have increasingly begun to analyze discourse as a means to increase awareness of the masculinity embedded in entrepreneurial beliefs and practices (Achtenhagen and Welter 2007;Ahl 2006;Berglund 2007), but they have yet to make widespread use of interdisciplinary methods capable of investigating the recursive links between individual-level actions and beliefs, social identities and group or category norms, and societal-level public discourse. Interdisciplinary and multimethod research models, such as the one demonstrated here, have the potential to fill this gap.…”

“…Media studies provide a way to observe how gendered sociocultural norms, conceptual associations, and perceptions of entrepreneurship are created and maintained through “the actual ‘doing’ of entrepreneurship” (Bourne and Calas , p. 425). The media is one of the most influential sources of cognitive and social input from the environment (Achtenhagen and Welter ) and a cultural institution that plays “a constitutive role in the construction of reality” (Moscovici , pp. 26–27), given its role in “generating and revealing common knowledge about socially‐shared beliefs, ideas, and values” (Coyne and Leeson , p. 2).…”

“…Reality television, in particular, remains a relatively unexamined, but potentially valuable, genre. As a multimodal research context, it provides scholars with more data and richer insights into the complex social/interactive aspects of gendered meaning‐making that are less observable in journal articles, textbooks, and case studies (Ahl ; Brush ; Ogbor ), stories (Pietiläinen ; Smith and Anderson ), newspapers, and magazines (Achtenhagen and Welter ; Anderson and Warren ; Eikhof, Summers, and Carter ; Radu and Redien‐Collot ).…”