Resilience Reimagined: Advancing a Gender-Sensitive Framework in Entrepreneurship Studies

This paper critically examines the importance of gendering entrepreneurial resilience, highlighting how traditional entrepreneurship research has largely neglected gender as a significant construct, often presenting entrepreneurship as a meritocratic and gender-neutral field. Despite rising female participation in entrepreneurship globally, women continue to face structural and cultural barriers that limit their entrepreneurial potential and growth, particularly in high-income countries. The dominant research discourse perpetuates a masculine understanding of entrepreneurship and employs male-centric methodologies that position women as underperforming. Furthermore, these approaches often homogenize women, ignoring diversity and intersectionality, and reduce gender to a binary variable, overlooking the complex interplay of social identities. The study argues that resilience frameworks in entrepreneurship are similarly gender-biased, emphasizing traits aligned with masculinity and failing to account for the contextual and intersectional factors that shape women’s experiences. A gendered framework is proposed as a more inclusive alternative, integrating context, intersectionality, and structural barriers into the analysis of entrepreneurial resilience, providing a basis for more gender-responsive entrepreneurship support programs and policies. The paper underscores that resilience is contextually embedded, shaped by formal and informal institutional environments, and that women entrepreneurs must navigate additional challenges such as caregiving burdens, discrimination, and limited access to resources.