Editorial: Living feminist entrepreneurship scholarly praxis

Feminist entrepreneurship scholarship has historically had the unenviable task of making the invisible visible. Through highlighting how the gendered dimensions of society, and the social construction of gender, tend to place women entrepreneurs at significant disadvantage in relation to men, feminists have continually sought to advance debates within entrepreneurship studies (Ahl, 2006; Calás et al., 2009; Jennings and Brush, 2013; Marlow, 2020; Martinez Dy and MacNeil, 2025). Yet, in a metareflection of such critiques, feminist entrepreneurship scholars have often experienced similar exclusionary dynamics in academia's structures of employment and systems of knowledge production. High barriers to entry to academic conversations for feminist entrepreneurship research, exacerbated by competition within the field, have presented challenges in normalising feminist assumptions in mainstream entrepreneurship conversations, a task further hampered by the broadly uncritical conflation of “gender” with “women” and the assumed reduced importance of such dialogues (Marlow, 2020).For this reason, we are grateful to The International Journal of Gender and Entrepreneurship for the dedicated space it offers to advance debate within feminist entrepreneurship research itself. In particular, we value the contributions of IJGE's recent special issue Feminist approaches to gender and entrepreneurship research (Jones et al., 2025), in which the editors bring to light the evolution and diversity of feminisms and encourage entrepreneurship scholars to more explicitly embrace feminist theory and methodologies. Jones et al. (2025) offer a detailed and informed overview of the existence of diverse feminisms and explain how these theoretical perspectives, while still being underutilised in gender and entrepreneurship research, have gradually informed contemporary debate and shifts towards more inclusive research agendas. Reflecting upon how the special issue articles illustrate pathways between theory and practice, they emphasise how crucial it is for theory to offer “actionable insights for policy and practice” (2025: 4).In this editorial, we extend and reorientate the issues outlined by Jones et al. (2025) by focusing upon illustrating the meaning of praxis – recognising the complexity arising from diverse perspectives through the lens of our own experiences. In so doing, we demonstrate how the courses of action we take as feminist scholars, with a political commitment to challenging dominant exclusionary narratives and practices, reflect differing experiences shaped by time, context and positionality, but converge in our shared efforts to advance the field through praxis. While our motivation and responsibility to do this is personal, it is made possible by the collective efforts of feminist scholarly community. We demonstrate this through our autoethnographic vignettes, which illustrate how early work on gender (read: heterosexual, white, able-bodied cis women) has evolved to reach into a broad and growing rhizomatic web of diverse, but interlinked, issues. Academics are often criticised for being distanced from, or elevated above, the “real world”. We challenge this by delving into the real-world rationale for the formation of our beliefs and actions as feminist entrepreneurship scholars, explaining how these have emerged over time, in conversation with our fields of study, and, we hope, generated meaningful change.Thus, building on insights from Jones et al. (2025), in this editorial, we seek to offer a complementary perspective that urges feminist researchers to enhance their commitment to feminist praxis and deepen their approach to interrogating positionality and power through explicit reflexivity, which we model with autoethnographic vignettes. Although we each hold different social positionalities and are at different career stages across three distinct institutional environments, we are inspired by Audre Lorde's (1984) work on the importance of attention to such differences in helping us to build solidarity across struggle, in our shared pursuit of advancing feminist research in entrepreneurship. Among the authors, one of us has contributed significantly to making inroads for feminist entrepreneurship research from a sociological entry point and paved a broad avenue for a range of feminist scholarship as a senior scholar, mentor and editor. The others, benefiting from this ground-breaking work in the field, have adopted explicit commitments to intersectional feminism that continue to provoke generative collaborative enquiry (Martinez Dy and MacNeil, 2025). This previous work encouraged scholars to explore intersectionality as a conceptual starting point, a “threshold concept” (Meyer and Land, 2005) for feminist inquiry, as a means to embrace relationality, reflexivity and praxis as part of entrepreneurship scholarship.Contemporary intersectional praxis not only challenges the gender binary and interrogates power structures that reproduce the patriarchal, neoliberal regime but also pushes to reconceptualise an entrepreneurship that includes the lived experience and knowledge of historically marginalised, new majority founders (Nelson Centre for Entrepreneurship, 2021). As such, we conceptualise intersectionality not as an endpoint but as a starting point for feminist inquiry over the threshold of which a vital critical feminist literature and method exists (Martinez Dy and MacNeil, 2025). 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