Rebel, Reverse or Relent : How Female Entrepreneurs Develop Communication Strategies on Social Media to Handle Gender Role Stereotypes

While entrepreneurs can shape how stakeholders perceive them, female entrepreneurs face communication challenges, as they must navigate their conflicting roles as women and entrepreneurs. Drawing on role congruity theory, expectancy violations theory, and arguments rooted in communication theory, we conducted 47 interviews with 35 female entrepreneurs and used 825 Instagram posts to analyze how female entrepreneurs develop communication strategies on social media. Emerging from the data, we reveal three distinct communication strategies (rebel, reverse, or relent) and explore how and why female entrepreneurs develop these communication strategies. We find that female entrepreneurs constantly balance intra-individual considerations between their roles as women and entrepreneurs with perceived societal pressures to conform or violate gender role stereotypes. Our findings bridge entrepreneurship, communication, and gender role literature and add to research on female entrepreneurs' communication choices in the digital realm.