usasbe 2016_presentation slides
TRANSCRIPT
What’s in a name?Semantics, self-perception & why women
don’t call themselves “entrepreneurs”
Mandy [email protected]
Natalie [email protected]
The Problem
Background» Discourse analysis of the first season of the
entrepreneurship-themed reality television show Shark Tank (Wheadon & Duval-Couetil, 2015)
» Logan (2012) study exploring self-employment and entrepreneurship among 1000 women in the UK
» Dohrman (2010) research on millennial entrepreneurs
So what?Does it REALLY matter whether women call
themselves “entrepreneurs” or not?
Less likely to believe that they are capable of becoming successful entrepreneurs
Overwhelmingly found in less-profitable industries
More difficult for women to secure venture funding & have limited access to valuable mentorship and support networks
““At any historical moment, both the gender order and
linguistic conventions exercise a profound constraint on our thoughts and actions, predisposing us to follow patterns set
down over generations.
-Eckert & McConnell-Ginet (2013), Language and Gender, p.44
Connections
• Language
• Thought
• Associations
• Perceptions
• Beliefs
• Actions
Words convey information, but they also generate meaning
Meet expectations/implicit
associations
Symbolic &cultural capital
Legitimacy
Consequences
Legitimacy & Symbolic Capital = Greater Access to Resources
““Change comes with the interruption of such patterns, and while sometimes that interruption may be sudden, it
comes more commonly through infinitesimally small events that may or may not be intentional.”
-Eckert & McConnell-Ginet (2013), Language and Gender, p.44
Methods» Mixed-methods sociolinguistics
framework
» Unified Identity Theory
» Textual analysis and corpus linguistics analysis
Research Questions
1. If females are not being called “entrepreneurs,” what terms are being used to identify them?
» Labels assigned by others
» Labels adopted by self
Research Questions2. What concepts or characteristics associated
with entrepreneurship might be discouraging the identification or perception of women as “entrepreneurs”?
» Specifically, how are these associations being produced/reproduced linguistically?
Alternate terms adopted by SELF
» Textual analysis of first season of Shark Tank
» Analyzed terms by frequency of occurrence—results visually represented in word cloud format
R1
Alternate terms assigned by OTHERS
» Corpus linguistics frequency analysis of 39 databases
» Compared frequency and sources of gendered alternative terms for “entrepreneur.”
Alternate terms adopted by SELF
R 1 Results
Alternate terms assigned by OTHERS
R1 Results
GENDER search terms:
womanpreneur(s) womenpreneur(s) femalepreneur(s)
girlpreneur(s)manpreneur(s) menpreneur(s) malepreneur(s) boypreneur(s)
Female al-ternatives
(1758)
Male alter-natives (47)
RELATIONAL search terms:
mompreneurs(s) mommypreneurs(s) motherpreneur(s) mumpreneur(s)
mummypreneur(s) mamapreneur(s)
dadpreneur(s) daddypreneur(s) fatherpreneur(s) papapreneur(s)
R2 ResultsComparison of corpus linguistics frequency analysis results in COCA for gendered collocations, represented as a Mutual Information (MI) score
“Entrepreneur(s)”
(n=7061)Total
%MI
Female/Woman/Women 149 2.11 1.52
Male/Man/Men 18 0.25 -1.49
