Struggling to be more visible: Female digital creative entrepreneurs in China

Abstract

Entrepreneurs have become the driving force of China’s economy over the past few decades. With a rapid surge in the growth of digital platforms, and the success of China’s platforms outside China, the aspiration to be entrepreneurial is recognized and celebrated. Increasingly, women are benefitting from this entrepreneurial fever. However, behind the increasing number of emerging women digital entrepreneurs, is the struggle to gain recognition. Drawing on cases studies of female digital startups, the article investigates some of the dilemmas faced when women strive to develop entrepreneurial identities. The article problematizes distinctions between the entrepreneur in a general sense, the creative entrepreneur, and female creative entrepreneurs. Whereas an entrepreneur in China is often conflated with a business owner, the identity of the creative entrepreneur is more precarious and unstable. The article finds that besides the difficulty to sustain a creative-based entrepreneurial identity, the hyper-competitive and masculinist fields of digital entrepreneurship and technical fields, combined with traditional gender roles and family responsibility, results in a devaluation of female entrepreneurship.