Gender differences and tech-based entrepreneurship: a literature review and research agenda

Despite the widespread recognition of the growing, positive contribution of female entrepreneurship in economic and social development processes, women are still less involved in high-growth entrepreneurship, especially in Europe, where their participation is lower than in most part of the world, and where they show some of the lowest rates of entrepreneurial perceptions (seeing new business opportunities, having the skills to start a new business, being undeterred by fear of failure), according to Women's Entrepreneurship GEM Report (2021). Gender gap in entrepreneurship and management is confirmed by the European Institute for Gender Equality, whose statistics show that across the EU, women business owners make up only 33.2% of self-employed people, and management boards are dominated by men (EIGE Report, 2021). This gap is somewhat larger in tech-based industries, where founding and managing a technology-based firm has been commonly considered to be a male affair (Green et al., 2003; Nelson and Levesque, 2007) and prominently within STEM fields (Poggesi et al., 2020), where women entrepreneurs are still strongly underrepresented (Dautzenberg, 2012; Tonoyan and Strohmeyer, 2021). Since the seminal contribution of Schwartz (1976), the debate surrounding women and entrepreneurship has grown up, focusing on their underrepresentation and their “marginalization” into sectors with low growth perspectives (Carter et al., 2000). There has been, among scholars as well as policymakers, a tendency to interpret this evidence as the expression of female structural weaknesses, to be fixed through specific programs aimed at training women to adopt prototypical entrepreneurial attitudes (Marlow, 2019). Despite this generalized view, a different perspective emerged in the same years, suggesting that female entrepreneurship specificities had to be considered as the result of a generalized gendered subordination (Fischer, 1993; Jennings and Brush, 2013). Even though this topic has given rise to a substantial body of literature, there are relatively few studies dedicated to investigating the presence of women entrepreneurs in technology-based sectors. Except for a few recent works (Wheadon and Duval-Couetil, 2019; Poggesi et al., 2020) that propose a literature review on the topic of gender and technology entrepreneurship, there is currently no dedicated strand of research that, in the field of management, identifies the issue of gender differences with reference to high-tech entrepreneurship. This is even more surprising, when considering that today technology plays a pervasive role and that even mature industries are undergoing strong changes precisely because of the spread of new technologies related to STEM fields. This opens great opportunities from which, once again, women risk being excluded or marginalized. It is therefore important, in our opinion, to examine this issue in depth and take stock of the results of the research conducted so far. Given the above, our study has two overarching objectives. The first is to document the development of the body of work related to gender differences and high-tech entrepreneurship. The second is to assess its contributions vis-a-vis the broader corpus of literature on female entrepreneurship.