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Development efforts in education have failed to conceive of gender as a socially constructed process that legitimizes gender inequality, and this article attempts to explain why gender inequality in schools should be problematized in this way. I argue that in developing countries like Nepal, promoting access to and participation in existing formal education programs is clearly necessary, but it is not, in itself, sufficient to transform gender power relations in the broader society. Reports of unequal distribution of girls’ and boys’ participation in school tell only part of the story; to fully understand gender inequality in schools and in societies as a whole, what is needed is an exploration of how gender is socially constructed and maintained in both the school and the home. This article examines the complexities of gender in a rural village of Nepal. Specifically, I interviewed community members, parents, teachers, and students and conducted observations in school and home settings. This article focuses on the educational experiences of girls and boys as they were affected and influenced by attitudes about gender.

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to demonstrate an understanding of:

A dualistic approach to femininity and masculinity as determining a demographic profile that is progressively outdated.

Prescribed gendered characteristics and roles that have evolved over recent centuries.

Technological platforms that have enabled voicing of non-conforming identities and supported the challenging of patriarchal societal constructs.

Marketing’s provision of social commentary on gender and sexuality and its potential to advance societal integration of diverse identities to reflect sexuo-gendered discourse.

Purpose: The overall purpose of the chapter is to begin development of a frame of reference that encompasses all gender constructs. This chapter focuses on gender constructs in relatively small-scale, sub-national ethnicities. These peoples represent a major focus of strain in the processes of national development and consolidation. The emphasis here is on the cultural (in this case gender oriented) variations that are preserved by their persistence.

Methodology/approach: The chapter is primarily a review of ethnographic literature, focusing on selected case studies that illustrate both the gender variations that exist and some of those that have already been lost.

Findings: The varieties of gender constructs that exist make it clear that the current binary social science paradigm for organizing our knowledge of gender is inadequate.

Value: This chapter is a reminder that rampant globalization threatens the survival of a variety of ethnic patterns and in reducing them to nameless, faceless cogs in a consumer-driven structure, cultural evolutionary potential for adapting to unforeseen conditions is lost.

Limitations: The data cited do not represent a systematic sample of existing variations. They have been chosen to illustrate the range of data existing outside the commonly accepted patterns.

The purpose of this study is to consider entrepreneurial imagery that sheds light on differing and emerging patterns of female entrepreneurial identity which illustrate shifts in the locus of power that challenge masculine hegemony and power structures. As a concept, power has an image component, and shifts in power are often conveyed by subtle changes in the cultural semiotic. Globally, images of female-entrepreneurship are socially constructed using stereotypes which are often pejorative. The semiotics of gendered identity as a complex issue is difficult to measure, assess and understand. Gender has its own semiotic codes, and, universally, images of female-entrepreneurship are socially constructed using pejorative stereotypes. Entrepreneurial imagery can shed light on differing and emerging patterns of female-entrepreneurial identity illustrating shifts in the locus of power that challenge masculine hegemony and power structures. Artefacts, images and semiotics construct alternative gendered social constructs of the entrepreneur to the heroic alpha-male. The imagery associated with the female-entrepreneur is either said to be invisible, or associated with “Pinkness” and the “Pink Ghetto”. Therefore, images, forms and presence associated with gendered entrepreneurial identities have been explored.

One hundred images of female-entrepreneurship were analysed semiotically using photo-montage techniques to identify common stereotypical representations, archetypes and themes. The resultant conceptual typology highlights the existence of near universal, archetypal gendered entrepreneurial stereotypes including the Business Woman; the Matriarch; the Diva; and the Pink-Ghetto Girl.

Although the results are subjective and open to interpretation, they illustrate that the contemporary female-entrepreneur, unlike their male counterparts, is not forced to adopt the persona of the “conforming non-conformist” because they have more options available to them to construct an entrepreneurial identity.

This study extends research into entrepreneurial identity by considering visual imagery associated with socially constructed stereotypes. In looking beyond images associated with the “Pink-Ghetto” the author challenges stereotypical representations of the appearance of female-entrepreneurs, what they look like and how they are perceived.

This study widens knowledge about entrepreneurship as a socio-economic phenomenon via images forming part of enterprising identity, a physical manifestation of nebulas phenomena acting as “visual metaphors” shaping expected constructs.

Leadership theories have moved from viewing leadership as an innate trait, towards models that recognise leadership as a social construction. Alongside this theorisation, gender and leadership remain of considerable interest, particularly given the under-representation of women in leadership positions. Methodological approaches to understanding leadership have begun to embrace innovative methods, such as historical analyses. This paper aims to understand how high profile women leaders construct a gendered leadership identity, with particular reference to authentic leadership.

Thematic analysis of autobiographies, a form of identity work, of four women leaders from business and politics: Sheryl Sandberg, Karren Brady, Hillary Clinton and Julia Gillard.

Analyses reveal that these women construct gender and leadership along familiar normative lines; for example, the emphasis on personal and familial values. However, their stories differ in that the normative extends to include close examination of the body and a sense of responsibility to other women. Overall, media representations of these “authentic” leaders conform to social constructions of gender. Thus, in the case of authentic leadership, a theory presented as gender neutral, the authenticity of leadership has to some extent been crafted by the media rather than the leader.

The study reveals that despite attempts to “craft” and control the image of the authentic self for consumption by followers, gendered media representations of individuals and leadership remain. Thus, alternative approaches to crafting an authentic leadership self which extend beyond (mainstream) media is suggested.

To understand how research-participant relationships are formed in research settings through experiences and analyses of content-specific gendered identity practices.

I draw upon a school-based ethnographically informed study exploring the construction of masculinities among white working-class boys in three schools in South London, United Kingdom between 2009 and 2011. To access participants’ perceptions, I used a methodology of observation, focus groups, semi-structured interviews and visual methods.

Themes of gendered embodiment, physicality and performance play a part in the formation of relationships in this study. Furthermore, such themes play a role – to varying degrees – in researcher-participant relationship-building. In understanding relationship-building practices, I make connections to my own reflexivity accounting for the multifaceted nature of identities, lifestyles and perspectives present in researcher-participant interaction.

Throughout the fieldwork, constructs of gender, nationality and class all contributed to how relationships were built. In navigating the power relations innate to all relationship-building, I discuss how I capitalised on my outsider status in terms of nationality to neutralise certain elements of class and gender that were normative to my participants, but, simultaneously, draw upon my insider status in terms of knowledge of the locale, humour and clothing which contributed greatly to how the relationships were constructed and maintained.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the gendered ideas and ideals attached to an imagined ideal Entrepreneur in a post-industrial rural community in Sweden. While research has not yet clearly explained how the ideal entrepreneur is constructed, the result, i.e. the gendered representations of entrepreneurs, is well-researched. Previous results indicate a prevalent portrayal of entrepreneurship as a predominantly masculine construct characterised by qualities such as self-made success, confidence and assertiveness.

Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in a community that is attempting to re-brand itself through garden tourism. Through inductive reasoning, this study analyses the gendered ideas and ideals regarding the community’s imagined ideal Entrepreneur who is to help the community solve its problems.

This study finds that the community forges the Entrepreneur into an imagined masculine ideal as holy, a saviour and a god and is replacing its historical masculine ironmaster with a masculine Entrepreneur. This study develops forging as a metaphor for the construction of the masculine ideal Entrepreneur, giving the community, rather than the entrepreneur himself, a voice as constructors. From social constructionism, this study emphasises how gendered ideas and ideals are shaped not only by the individual realities but more so in the reciprocal process by the realities of others.

The metaphor of forging adds an innovative theoretical dimension to the feminist constructionist approach and suggests focusing on how the “maleness” of entrepreneurship is produced and reproduced in the local. Previously, light has been shed on how male entrepreneurs perform their identities collectively; the focus of this study is on the social construction of this envisioned Entrepreneur within a rural community. The development of forging thus contributes as a way of analysing entrepreneurship in place. The choice of an ethnographic study allowed the authors to be a part of the real-life world of community members, providing rich data to explore entrepreneurship and gender.

to examine consumers' perceptions of retail brand representations of gender-oriented and/or sexuality-oriented identities. The authors explore the value of developing more progressive, inclusive brand values to support more effective retail brand communications and imagery.

Photo elicitation, utilising LGBTQIA+/sexuo-gendered imagery from retail brand marketing communications, facilitated discussion within focus groups representing various genders, age generations and sexualities.

Younger generations indicate a preference for fluid gender and sexuality and endorse retail brands that represent this progressive understanding. Gender and age moderate preferences for representative imagery, with older males more resistant to sexuo-gendered messages and females of all ages more accepting.

The research is limited in generalisability, geography and demographics. The focussed approach did, however, enable collection of rich, insightful data to underpin evaluations of communicative brand values.

The inclusion of diverse and fluid sexuo-gendered identities within the brand values of retailers would enable effective targeting of consumers across a range of more traditional cohorts.

The evolving ideology towards inclusiveness, identified within the generational cohorts, demonstrates social change through progressive acceptance of more fluid gendered and sexual identities.

The research adopts a novel approach to examining diverse, sexuo-gendered imagery within gendered and generational cohorts, offering qualitative examples of a progressive social ideology.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the social construction of gendered subjects in entrepreneurship education (EEd), through the analysis of course descriptions. For this purpose, the analytical constructs of the Fictive Student and the Fictive Entrepreneur are developed.

Through analysis of 86 course descriptions from 81 universities in 21 countries, this study examines the degree to which course descriptions use gendered language, how such language constructs gendered subjects, and the resultant implications.

This paper finds that course descriptions are predominantly, but not exclusively, masculine in their language. More importantly, the distribution of feminine and masculine language is uneven across course descriptions. Context variables such as regional or national culture differences do not explain this distribution. Instead, the phenomenon is explained by course content/type; whereby practice-based entrepreneurship courses are highly masculine, compared to traditional academic courses, where students learn about entrepreneurship as a social phenomenon.

Universities and educators have not taken into account recent research about the real and possible negative consequences of positioning entrepreneurship in a stereotypical, masculinized fashion. This may offer an inexpensive opportunity to improve recruitment and description accuracy.

The paper’s contribution is fourfold. First, it contributes to debates on the gendering of entrepreneurship by extending these into EEd. Second, it extends Sarasvathy’s (2004) concern with barriers to, rather than incentives for, entrepreneurship to include EEd. Third, it contributes to the emerging literature on entrepreneurship as practice, by highlighting the masculization of EEd, as it gets closer to practice and the role of language in this. Finally, it highlights the gendered implications of English medium courses.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to research on gender and corporate boards of directors by focusing on how female board professionals construct particular notions of accessing and succeeding in boards.

A discursive perspective is offered, based on conceiving gender as something that is “done” in social interaction. In the spirit of critical discourse analysis, the talk of female board professionals, produced in interviews in the Finnish context, is analyzed in‐depth.

Two discourses are located in the talk of female board professionals: the discourse of competence and the discourse of gender. It is argued that the discourses constitute a boardroom gender paradox, which is characterized by several contradictory elements. By conceptualizing and illustrating this paradox, the study scrutinizes the elusive ideal of women's large‐scale entry into corporate boards.

Future studies should make use of the insights developed, and apply them to cross‐societal comparative research.

For corporate decision‐makers, the findings suggest a rethinking of how “competence” is defined and applied.

Paradox has rarely been addressed in the literature on gender and corporate boards. Understanding how the women interviewed (re)construct a boardroom gender paradox offers a unique contribution to the literature.