Gender, culture, and implicit theories about entrepreneurs: a cross-national investigation
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Gender, culture, and implicit theories about entrepreneurs: a cross-national investigation Alka Gupta & Safal Batra & Vishal K. Gupta
Accepted: 30 September 2020 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Considerable interest exists in understanding how people perceive and respond to entrepreneurs, more nominally referred to as implicit theories about entrepreneurship. A prominent aspect of people’s implicit theories is gender, perhaps because it is based on readily visible and universal biological attributes. Building on social role theory, we examine gender stereotypes associated with entrepreneurs in two culturally different countries, namely USA and India. Our investigation focuses on perceptions about entrepreneurs in general as well as entrepreneurs in specific venture forms (highand low-growth ventures, commercial and social ventures). Results offer two new insights regarding gender stereotypes about entrepreneurs. First, despite some similarities across the two countries, there are crucial cross-national differences in how entrepreneurs are perceived. Second, gender stereotypes about entrepreneurs are quite cohesive and coherent in the USA, but considerably more fragmented and disjointed in India. Overall, our research suggests that there is significant crossnational variation in gender-typing of entrepreneurship,
A. Gupta Bernard M. and Ruth R. Bass Center for Leadership Studies, State University of New York, Binghamton, NY, USA S. Batra Indian Institute of Management, Kashipur, Uttarakhand, India V. K. Gupta (*) Culverhouse College of Business, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL 35406, USA e-mail: [email protected]
which provides support for the position that implicit theories about entrepreneurs result from socioeconomic circumstances and cultural conditions of the society. Keywords Entrepreneurship . Gender . Culture . Social role theory JEL classifications M13 . J16 . L26
1 Introduction People hold implicit theories—or “images in the head” (Shane 2008)—about various occupational groups (Junker and van Dick 2014), including entrepreneurs (Hill and Levenhagen 1995). A crucial aspect of our mental images is gender (Hoyt and Burnette 2013), which describes beliefs that construe the masculine and feminine as different (Ridgeway 2011). Research finds that the prevailing discourse about entrepreneurship is strongly embedded upon and within contemporary notions of masculinity (de Pillis and Meilich 2006; Dean and Ford 2017). Some scholars, however, consider conventional understanding of entrepreneurship as male-typed to be simplistic (Calás et al. 2009), arguing that it ignores stereotypically feminine venture types (e.g., social ventures; Hechavarria and Ingram 2016; Lee and Huang 2018). Unfortunately, existing knowledge in this area may be culturally biased as it is based on “a Western idealization of business creation and success” and rests largely on evidence obtained in
A. Gupta et al.
North America and Western Europe (Galloway et al. 2015, p. 683). To a
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