The female entrepreneur: Fragments of a genealogy

Abstract

This short article, based on a lecture, offers fragments for a genealogy of female entrepreneurship in the Global North. It argues that in business and management books and social texts, the entrepreneur has historically been overwhelmingly figured as male – as ‘entrepreneurial man’. Yet, over the past few decades, encouraged by both gender mainstreaming and neoliberal feminism, the symbolic locus of entrepreneurialism in popular culture has increasingly gravitated towards women. It shows how we might trace a mediatised evolution of female entrepreneurialism and its ideologies: from tragic 1950s entrepreneurial stars, through to the plucky shoulder-padded heroines of women’s magazines and films of the 1980s, through to the girlbosses, Instagram entrepreneurs and hustle culture of the present. What, it asks, is happening to the female entrepreneur in an era of neoliberal crisis? And what ‘left feminist’ alternatives to, or intersections with, this figure might be in our midst, or on the horizon?