Title: Entrepreneurship education and gender: the man-made entrepreneur

Authors: Maria Aggestam; Caroline Wigren-Kristoferson

Addresses: Sten K. Johnson Centre for Entrepreneurship, School of Economics and Management, Lund University, Scheelevägen 15B, SE-223 63, Lund, Sweden ' Sten K. Johnson Centre for Entrepreneurship, School of Economics and Management, Lund University, Scheelevägen 15B, SE-223 63, Lund, Sweden

Abstract: As the literature on entrepreneurship education grows, the issue of equality in entrepreneurship education has been raised; i.e., whether students are educated to become entrepreneurs equally. This article provides a critical and thought-provoking analysis of a portfolio of practices that, on the surface, appear to be successful in training entrepreneurs. To this purpose, we initiate a debate on what entrepreneurship education programmes tend to omit. We provide an argument within entrepreneurship scholarship that takes into consideration the diversity and complexity of gender in entrepreneurship. We present an insightful example of what we do in our university classrooms whilst calling for a more encompassing perspective of gender within present-day teaching practice. We acknowledge that academic entrepreneurship education is gendered (Ahl, 2006) and we show how hegemonic masculine-framed foundations of entrepreneurship influence the vocabulary of teaching and learning in Sweden. The paper provides insights into how both teachers and students unluckily, fail to identify the masculinisation of entrepreneurship education.

Keywords: entrepreneurship education; gender; critical theory.

DOI: 10.1504/IJGSB.2021.113837

International Journal of Globalisation and Small Business, 2021 Vol.12 No.1, pp.5 - 25

Received: 16 Oct 2019
Accepted: 04 Jun 2020
Published online: 31 Mar 2021 *