Scaffolding liminality: The lived experience of women entrepreneurs in digital spaces

Although digital entrepreneurship has been posited as a “great leveller”, little is known about how women experience the transition into digital entrepreneurial careers, nor the coping strategies they employ in order to navigate digital work environments. To address this, we undertake a qualitative study using a liminality lens to explore how women digital entrepreneurs transition into, participate in and shape the digital spaces they occupy. Our findings show that women digital entrepreneurs operate in a dual space as both managers of the ritual process and individuals undergoing a liminal journey in digital contexts characterised by fluid structures, precarity and wider gender and capitalist social relations. In particular, our findings demonstrate the role of women digital entrepreneurs as active agents of their transition through liminality, and the creative ways in which they acquire and develop new knowledge, skills and relationships. As a result, we contribute to women's digital entrepreneurship, by theorizing an often overlooked aspect of career change, namely the liminal space of transformation through our provision of new empirical insights which highlights the ways in which gender and neoliberal narratives are embedded in digital spaces that reinforces women's outsider status.