Discourses of Female Entrepreneurship Perspectives from the Support Initiatives for Women in Enterprise

Abstract

The substantial increase in the entrepreneurial activities of women over the past decades has sparked a proliferation of research within the field of female entrepreneurship. This interest is also motivated by the increasing concerns of the comparative 'underperformance' of these businesses to their male counterparts. In large part, the finding of such research remains inconclusive (Robson, Jack and Freel, 2008). DuRietz and Henrekson (2000) label this research phenomenon as the "female underperformance hypothesis" and argue that when accounting for structural factors, women-owned businesses perform equally to that of men’s. However, within the background of the concerns of the business performance issues of female-owned businesses, increasing support initiatives are made available for these women -- at both governmental and industry levels. Little research has been conducted with regards to the impact of these initiatives. Furthermore, female entrepreneurship research is met with its own theoretical and methodological shortcomings. This has led to the increasing calls of more qualitative research aimed at investigating the deeper issues that affect these women’s experiences in business. This research sets out to answer to these calls by investigating the discourses of female entrepreneurship that are employed and created by these support initiatives. By employing a poststructuralism feminist framework, this study seeks to examine how these organisations construct and position both female entrepreneurs and female entrepreneurship. The study analyses the archival reports and websites of ten New Zealand support initiatives. The method of discourse analysis is used to examine the nature of language used by these initiatives in constructing the social reality of female entrepreneurs. Additionally, it seeks to offer a viewpoint of the implications of these constructions. As such, three discourses were found -- economic, community and awareness -- that appear to confirm the secondary position of female entrepreneurs within the business and societal contexts.