Entrepreneurial experiences of women in Canadian high technology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore how women entrepreneurs experience entrepreneurship in the Canadian technology sector and the types of obstacles posed by the field's male‐dominated character. Design/methodology/approach The authors' research purpose called for an inductive approach. Interviews with a sample of women technology entrepreneurs allowed for in‐depth exploration of their subjective experiences and the contexts in which these were situated. Findings The research subjects encountered persistent gender stereotypes, a paucity of female role models, resistance from associates within and outside of their organizations, and societal pressures to maintain appropriate levels of work‐family balance. Research limitations/implications Although exploratory and preliminary in nature, the findings indicate that women entrepreneurs do not experience “glass ceilings” as much as they experience “labyrinth walls” and what the authors identify as “thorny floors”, meaning opposition and sabotage from male subordinates. Social implications Women considering entrepreneurship should expect to encounter resistance to their leadership, albeit manifested in different forms than in corporate settings. Male‐dominated fields such as technology involve industry‐level resistance as well as opposition from within the organization. Nevertheless, women perceived the field as merit‐driven whereby they gained acceptance once they had established themselves as credible competitors. Originality/value This study is one of few to elucidate the multiple levels of opposition to women's entrepreneurship in male‐dominated settings and introduces the concept of “thorny floors” to research on women's advancement and entrepreneurship.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".