Narratives of International Women Entrepreneurs: An Exploratory Case Study of Identity Negotiation in Technology Startups

Abstract

About the case: Female entrepreneurs play a significant role in new business creation, yet women's entrepreneurship stories remain largely absent in professional communication research. Therefore, a need exists to “give voice” to female entrepreneurship stories, and this exploratory case examines the unique identities that three female entrepreneurs express in their narratives. This case asks how three female entrepreneurs reconciled the discourses of entrepreneurship, gender, and culture to construct a unique entrepreneurial identity in their reflective narratives. Situating the case: Professional communication has only recently begun to explore entrepreneurship communication, and little of that literature explicitly investigates women's experiences. This case, by comparison, uses three conceptual categories—entrepreneurial identity, gender identity, and cultural identity—to explore how three women negotiated their workplace identities. Methods: We recruited three women who self-identified as technology company entrepreneurs, each from a different culture, and recorded their oral narratives about their entrepreneurial journeys. Three raters independently coded data drawing on dimensions extracted from prior literature to build “identity curves” for each narrative. Results: Analysis suggests that each participant negotiated discourses of entrepreneurship, gender, and culture differently, with the greatest divergence appearing on cultural codes, and the least divergence appearing on gender codes. Conclusions: Based on these results, we suggest that future research should begin with the assumption that no single “entrepreneurial identity” exists for female entrepreneurs, and more broadly that professional communication research should foreground differences among individuals rather than attempt to aggregate individual experiences into homogenous characterizations.