Academic Entrepreneurship – Gendered Discourses and Ghettos

In this article, we explore how the academic entrepreneurship discourse is constructed and gendered, based on texts on academic entrepreneurship and interviews with teachers and researchers at two Swedish universities. We show that the global entrepreneurship discourse is met by both counteracting and contributory discourses in academia. We also show that entrepreneurship-promoting texts in which only men are depicted address both women and men, while pictures of women are only targeted to women, often found in ‘entrepreneurial ghettos ’ and conceptualized as in need of support, as less risk-willing and less willing to commercialize their research. Another problem addressed in this article is how to design gender mainstreaming interventions without reproducing such stereotypes. We believe the solution is not gender neutrality, but to move back and forth between liberal feminist and social constructionist approaches