Abstract
This paper presents an interdisciplinary case study on women's inclusivity in an entrepreneurship class consisting of adults enrolled in interdisciplinary majors, including science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. With women empowerment through entrepreneurship education as a theme, this case study in learning innovations aims to encourage diversity and inclusivity in the classroom in discussing successful women entrepreneurs alongside men. Acceptance of ideas proposed by women in a class setting formed a basis for this study. Furthermore, this case study used the idea to reinforce women's empowerment during in-class lectures subtly. This paper reports findings based on our case study across multiple undergraduate and graduate classes comprising majors and adults from STEM disciplines.
Introduction
Homogenous environments restrict learning opportunities across social and cultural lines (Hurtado et al., 1994). Entrepreneurship is inherently interdisciplinary by its nature. Even an introductory course in Entrepreneurship exposes students to multiple disciplines such as Finance, Engineering, Production, Quality Control, Marketing, Sales, and Law. At its foundation, learning is about changing or broadening students' perspectives on the subject of their study.
Entrepreneurship education varies from specific STEM disciplines in that “to generate more quickly a greater variety of different ideas for how to exploit a business opportunity, and the ability to project a more extensive sequence of actions for entering business” (Ronstadt et al., 1988). So, the students inherently have an aptitude for assimilating data more broadly and are also trained to identify areas of non-conformity rather rapidly.
Students bring their own multiple social group identities to the learning environment (Johnson, 2018) – race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, gender, sexual orientation, and disability. As a result, students are exposed to various experiences, perspectives, and opinions from their peer group. In this study, we chose woman's empowerment as an aspect of diversity. Discussing successful women entrepreneurs alongside men and how their ideas helped shape society was chosen as a theme—concepts related to how business ideas proposed by women in the class are considered and accepted by classroom groups formed a basis for this study. The objective is to highlight the disparities in gender inclusivity and emphasize the importance of education in reducing these disparities.
While it is essential to make the curriculum more inclusive (Gefen et al., 2007) across the board, it may be more challenging to achieve this in STEM core disciplines. For instance, including diversity, justice, religion, and social responsibility is challenging in a STEM-specific course. Interdisciplinary entrepreneurship education can help fill this gap. Past research suggests that the entrepreneurship education approach is teaching entrepreneurship as a method that can be implemented by potential student entrepreneurs (Neck & Greene, 2011). In addition, students in entrepreneurship classes are often sensitized to the importance of habit-forming skills, developing personal and professional discipline, inner strength, and perseverance with their ideas such as gender and diversity issues. This case study attempts to understand the impact of gender and diversity education in entrepreneurship courses that diverse majors, including STEM disciplines, take. This study documents the generally pre-existing gender biases and attempts to reduce the gender biases through creating awareness about women's inclusivity. Specifically, this article attempts to address the gap in literature highlighted by Hagg and Kurczewska (Hägg & Kurczewska, 2020). Despite entrepreneurship being an experiential discipline, the gap in understanding the interplay of experiential and philosophical knowledge bases in this discipline. After lectures in class about women's inclusivity and creating awareness on the topic, the case study observes the changes in the participants in perceptions about gender and women's inclusivity in their group discussions.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: A brief review of past literature in entrepreneurship and a review of literature on gender issues are presented, followed by the case study and the data analysis. Next, the results of the case study are presented, followed by a discussion and conclusions.
Literature Review
There has been extensive research in entrepreneurship education, and the importance of entrepreneurship is well recognized (Liguori et al., 2018; Vanevenhoven & Liguori, 2013). Entrepreneurship has evolved as a diverse discipline with increasing emphasis on perspectives involving learning and evaluation. Entrepreneurial pedagogy has evolved from a discipline that is based on entrepreneurial intentions perspective and has leaned towards being a more learning and evaluation perspective (Loi et al., 2016). The students have divergent entrepreneurial motivations, diverse learning styles and bring with them a variety of professional and life experiences (Vanevenhoven & Liguori, 2013). An increasing amount of research in the area of entrepreneurship education found that the discipline is characteristically diverse and the stakeholders in the discipline bring with them an urge to be entrepreneurial and aware of entrepreneurship (Bae et al., 2014; Fretschner & Weber, 2013; Peterman & Kennedy, 2003). The students typically have launched a business or entrepreneurial intentions in the near term (Neck & Greene, 2011; Rasmussen & Sørheim, 2006). Research has also found that, generally, the entrepreneurship program outcomes are stronger compared to other programs (Martin et al., 2013; Nabi et al., 2017). We would suggest that stronger programs such as entrepreneurship education have a greater chance of conveying important issues such as gender diversity and women inclusivity to students. The obejective of this case study, was to observe the change in perspectives towards women inclusivity within an entrepreneurship course context. The established gender differences in entrepreneurship research are reviewed next.
Gender Research in Entrepreneurship Education
The research results in general on gender differences in entrepreneurship education are mixed, with a good portion of research suggesting that men have an advantage in their disposition to being entrepreneurial and more entrepreneurial intentions (Chen et al., 1998; Chowdhury & Endres, 2005; Cox et al., 2002; Wilson et al., 2009; Zhao et al., 2005). Based on the perceived and expected gender roles (Eagly, 2013), women and men tend to choose occupations that fit their gender stereotypes. Extending this idea of stereotypes to genders, past research found that entrepreneurship education is recognized as more beneficial for women and considered as an “equalizer” (Wilson et al., 2009).
Gender disparities in other disciplines outside of entrepreneurship have also been well researched. For example, the glass-ceiling phenomenon where inadequate women representation is well-studied (Insch et al., 2008). Although several statutes and workplace initiatives are in place to reduce gender discrimination at the workplace, women are still less represented in the upper echelons of corporate management levels (Grout et al., 2007). Regardless, women are overlooked in career advancements at the workplace, pay levels, and perceptions (Kauhanen & Napari, 2015; Lazear & Rosen, 1990; Noonan et al., 2005).
Similar disparities exist in the areas of technological careers, as reported in the past literature. Literature suggests that females place lesser value on technological education and have to lower their expectations about succeeding in technology-related areas (Beyer, 2008). Women also displayed a lower level of positive attitude disposition towards computer usage and computer education (Harris et al., 2009; Young, 2000). While the results from the past results are mixed and not definitive, the research has established perceptual differences in gender (Venkatesh & Morris, 2000).
Past research suggests that the entrepreneurship education approach is teaching entrepreneurship as a method that can be implemented by potential student entrepreneurs rather than as a discipline (Neck & Greene, 2011). Even an introductory course exposes students to multiple disciplines such as constructs centering around discrimination against women, especially at work, has been considerably debated and researched, and the existence of overt as well as implicit gender differences as recognized in the past research as stubbornly persisting (Lazear & Rosen, 1990; Wood et al., 1993). The experiences outside of the classroom permeate into the daily thinking of the students enrolled in entrepreneurship courses. The diversity in entrepreneurship education also brings in a diversity of those perceptions. This well-established phenomenon in research about gender differences in perceptions and disposition to entrepreneurship also reflects in the in-class activities. We believe that these perceptions of diversity exist in both men and women. However, in the classroom, women are not included as much in discussions by men.
Moreover, women participate less when they do not perceive a sense of inclusivity. Reducing the perception of a glass-ceiling and promoting female inclusivity involves educating both genders: Educate males about the importance of women's inclusivity, and educate women on the importance of self-perception about inclusivity. The research on entrepreneur education in this area emphasizes that in addition to just the entrepreneurial mindset and skills required for new businesses, Entrepreneurial education can have really positive and far-reaching outcomes (Neck & Corbett, 2018). Research in entrepreneurship pedagogy has even suggested that entrepreneurship strategies are teachable, and students benefit from the entrepreneurship methods such as simulations, coursework, games, and reflective practices that are taught in class (Neck & Greene, 2011).
In order to implement this, we conducted a case study by observing the class discussions in entrepreneurship classes. After several weeks of familiarization among students, we had an intense discussion about the necessity of women's inclusivity. The session included lectures, videos, class discussions about women's equality, workplace perceptions about women's pay disparities, and the like. The session also included several imputes about being aware of such discrimination behaviors and consciously including women and giving them due credit.
We captured the differences in perceptions based on the participation of male and female students in their inclusivity behaviors before the class discussion and after the class discussion about women's inclusivity. In addition, we measured the women's inclusivity based on their participation in class discussions. Specifically, we measured the mean participation by females and males and responses to gender before the inclusivity-discussion and post-inclusivity discussion. Thus, this case study captures the effectiveness of entrepreneurship education as called for in Liguori, Winkler et al. (Liguori et al., 2018) related to shaping society and removing the social and gender-based disparities.
Pre-discussion, the topics, and discussion questions were designed to be generic and open-ended in order to permit free participation. For example, one of the discussion prompts provided to the students included questions such as: “Name three entrepreneurs you can think of - who have grown their businesses into major organizations,” “What do you think of: the science and the art of starting and managing a business?”, “Why does the entrepreneur need to be honest about their motivation for starting the company?”, “What differentiates an entrepreneurial business from one that is a venture-backed business?”
Interestingly, in a class with a 29% female population, not one person mentioned a female entrepreneur. The fact that no one mentioned had prompted an inclusivity-discussion during the subsequent class specifically, and women empowerment was subtly encouraged throughout the term. Post-inclusivity discussions included explicit asks from the students such as: “We are about ten weeks into the term, and I would like to hear your current perspective about women Entrepreneurship. Please discuss how the women inclusivity discussion benefitted you, and how if your perspectives had changed compared to the beginning of the term” When the instructor pointed out that in a class of 45, no one mentioned women entrepreneurs - did that influence your thought process about inclusivity? How? In what way has your individual group's brainstorming sessions shaped your perspectives in this context? You can also include your perspective from your work context if you like - for example: Are you a full-time/part-time student? Employed full-time/part-time/self-employed? In what capacity? What do you perceive at the work setting in terms of women in leadership roles? If you plan to be an entrepreneur, how do you plan to bring inclusivity in this women entrepreneurship context? How do you plan to use the concepts you learned about diversity/women entrepreneurship outside of the classroom setting such as your work/personal etc.?”
A sample response from a male student who is also working part-time was: “After our discussion in class regarding women entrepreneurs, my perspectives have changed in that I noticed how even though there are many successful women entrepreneurs, it is most common for the men to be recognized. Looking back, I realized how even in the news and on television, it is very uncommon to hear women entrepreneurs being recognized/spoken of for their success. When it was pointed out in class that no one mentioned a woman entrepreneur, my thoughts were definitely influenced by inclusivity because I immediately started to think about why it was that I did not mention nor that it did not even cross my mind to state a woman entrepreneur. The only reason I could think of was the fact that I do not see many women entrepreneurs being mentioned in my daily life. When I use social media, the internet, or watch TV, the only big-name entrepreneurs that come up are men such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Only now, after our discussion in class, do I see that there is a problem of inclusivity relating to the celebration of women entrepreneurs. Our group brainstorming session has shaped my perspectives in this context in that I noticed that when we talked about our business idea because it involves working on cars, we barely discuss the fact that there are many women who partake in working on their own cars. This further proves just how much women are excluded and not recognized for the things they do. Especially in corporate settings, it is still common for women not to hold high-level job positions such as CEO or COO. This all makes me think about if and when I start my own business how I am going to incorporate and try to include women entrepreneurs. One of the ways I believe I can do so is by trying to hire an even number of men and women so long as they are qualified to do the work that is needed. Also, making sure that promotions are not only given to certain people but to those who deserve it and is shown through their work. I plan to use the concepts I learned about the diversity and inclusion of women entrepreneurs outside the classroom in my everyday life and future career. In my future career, I plan to speak up in times where I believe an opportunity has been taken away from a woman and given to someone else who is not deserving. Also, in my personal life, I plan to celebrate the women entrepreneurs in my family and encourage the other women in my life to become entrepreneurs. I will also start to add more women entrepreneurs to my social media accounts so that in the future if asked to name successful entrepreneurs, I will no longer overlook the many women entrepreneurs who have had successful careers. While these are only small and not very impactful steps, I believe it is a good start to living a more inclusive life.”
A sample response from a female student in the same class was: “As a woman myself, my perspectives regarding women entrepreneurship have not changed compared to the beginning of the term. I still think that women are just as capable as men in the workplace, including in filling leadership roles. While the good news is that we are already progressing into an era of gender equality, I think the reason why the stigma is still strong (no one in the class mentioned women entrepreneurs during class discussion) and also why statistics show a comparatively lower number of women filling in management positions than men is because of two things: past (inequality still exists) gender oppression and working-mother dilemma. In the past, women's roles were only limited to doing domestic work and taking good care of the children. This mindset of 'divided roles' is still prevalent to date, both consciously and unconsciously, in our mindset and takes a lot of effort to put an end to. This is a sad thing, but as I've mentioned earlier, we are slowly but surely heading in the right direction. The second is the role dilemma of a full-time working mother. Getting into a top position in a firm requires effort and time, which is very hard to have a good balance of when someone has become a mother. Sometimes, these very women ended up giving up their careers because they feel bad for their children. They are not in any way incapable of getting there, but other priorities stop them from doing so (maybe also explains why the wealthy list is dominated by men). The cases can be different across countries, obviously, but this is a pretty common situation where I am at, in Southeast Asia. My biggest hope, though, is so that there will be less and less gender inequality in the future and that women don't even have to feel bad for whatever choices they make, whether they want to be a mother, a career woman, or both”.
Data Collection, Methodology, and Findings
For this case study, we analyzed the number of discussion posts by students of both genders enrolled in Entrepreneurship classes at both bachelor's and Master's levels. The classes were synchronous online classes conducted over zoom, lending personal interaction to the students and the interaction directly with the instructor. We gathered data about discussion postings by gender for online discussions before discussing gender equality and women's inclusivity. We also collected data about the discussion postings about cross-gender responses after an in-depth discussion about gender equality and women's inclusivity (inclusivity discussion henceforth). We analyzed the students' participation in online class discussion topics for the pre-inclusivity discussions and post-inclusivity discussions. We tracked the number of posts by males and several discussion posts by females. Out of the total discussion postings by either gender, we tracked the number of responding posts by either gender to the original postings and the number of responding postings to either gender.
Sample Characteristics
The sample consisted of adults enrolled in entrepreneurship classes at both masters and bachelors' level in a University on the west coast. The same classes were used for both pre-inclusivity data and post-inclusivity data. About ten students from the pre-inclusivity data did not participate later in the discussions for various reasons unrelated to the class.
Out of the pre-inclusivity sample, 26 were females, and 64 were males. Out of the total number of participants in the pre-inclusivity data, 21.1% were unemployed, 23.3% were employed part-time, 22.2% were employed full-time, 15.6% were self-employed or entrepreneurs, and 17.8% did not report their employment status. Out of the post-inclusivity sample, 25 were females, and 55 were males. Out of the total number of participants in the post-inclusivity data, 20% were unemployed, 22.5% were employed part-time, 21.3% were employed full-time, 17.5% were self-employed or entrepreneurs, and 18.8% did not report their employment status.
A total of 90 students participated in the pre-inclusivity discussion postings. Of the 90 students, 26 were females, and 64 were males. There were a total of 368 discussion postings during the pre-inclusivity phase. Eighty students participated in the post-inclusivity discussion postings. Of the 80 students, 25 were female, and 55 were male. There were a total of 280 discussion postings during the post inclusivity phase.
Data Analysis and Results
SPSS was used to analyze the data. First, we ran the frequencies to find out the sample characteristics, and for analyzing the number of discussion posts for the pre-inclusivity and post inclusivity posts, we ran the crosstabs and comparison of means. The results are reported below in Table 1.
Table of Means for Pre-Inclusivity Discussion Data.
The data collected prior to the women inclusivity discussion sample had 26 females and 64 males in the discussions. There were 368 posts, with 107 being posts by females and 261 being posts by males. Females averaged 4.12 posts (standard deviation 2.47), and males averaged 4.08 posts (standard deviation = 2.43) for every post by a female, a mean of 4 responding posts were by males. This translated to a standard deviation of 3.86 with 1.58 responding posts by females, with a standard deviation of 1.88. For every posting by a male, a mean of 3.55 responding posts were by males, with a standard deviation of 3.754 and 1.29 responding posts by females with a standard deviation of 1.297. Every female discussant responded to another female with a mean of 1.58 posts with a standard deviation of 1.55 and responded to another male with a mean of 2.54 and a standard deviation of 1.92. Every male discussant responded to another male with a mean of 1.63 posts with a standard deviation of 2.622.
After the initial discussions on topics earlier detailed, the instructors had a detailed lecture about Women's inclusivity. The lecture included an in-depth review and feedback about the prior discussions and a perspective lecture on women's inclusivity. Then several topics were again opened for discussion. Finally, the same data were gathered based on the discussions in the post-lecture discussions. Table 2 presented below summarizes the results for the post-lecture discussions.
Table of Means for Post-Inclusivity Discussion Data.
There were 80 participants in the discussions in the phase after the in-class discussion about women's inclusivity. Each discussant posted a mean of 3.50 posts for any gender, with a standard deviation of 2.295. The minimum number of posts for any gender was one, and the maximum was 8. Within the genders: Females had a mean of 3.44 (N=25 and standard deviation = 2.38) posts. Males had a mean of 3.53 posts (N=55 and standard deviation = 2.27). Every Female discussant was responded by a male with a mean of 2. 04 and standard deviation of 2.71, and by a female with a mean of 2. 08 and standard deviation of 1.236. Every Male discussant was responded by a male with a mean of 2. 45 and standard deviation of 3.00, and by a female with a mean of 0.95 and standard deviation of 1.671. Every female discussant responded to another male with a mean of 2.08 posts and standard deviation of 2.361 and responded to another female discussant with a mean of 0.88 posts and standard deviation of 1.453.
Every male discussant responded to another male with a mean of 2.36 posts and standard deviation of 2.497 and responded to another female with a mean of 0.89 posts with a standard deviation of 1.453.
Discussion
Inclusivity was defined as more participation on the part of the women in cross-gender discussions and the males trying to recognize and make an effort to include women. Results suggest that this objective seems to have been realized. The mean postings by women were 4.12 before the discussion about inclusivity, and the mean of posts by females was3.44 after the discussion. Although it may seem like the mean posts have declined, we may point out that the percentage of participation of females in the discussion had gone up by almost two percentage points to the total number of posts by gender from 29.1% to 30.7%, suggesting that the participation has indeed gone up.
Similarly, there was a clear trend in the responding posts. Females responded to female discussants more after the inclusivity discussion: Females' mean responding posts to females went up from 1.58 prior to the discussion to 2.08 after the discussion.
The data did not provide latitude to analyze further about the male participation for responses with the broad participation of the males reducing in the latter part of the data collection with both means and percentage participation showing a decline.
Conclusions
The data indicate that inclusivity discussions are meaningful across genders. For the male participants, several participants acknowledged in their interviews that they had not looked at the inclusivity issue from the point of view of women empowerment and gender equality. In their interview, the male participants acknowledged that the inclusivity discussion had effectively raised the awareness of women's inclusion in several of their daily work-related activities outside of this class and not confined just for the class discussions. This would indicate that the lack of women's inclusivity is an artifact of social conditioning and stereotypical thinking. Given an opportunity to look beyond those, both genders are ready and available for inclusivity: males are more readily accepting of women, and women can rise above the non-inclusivity perspectives of isolating themselves and ready to be included more. This is an important contribution of this paper for the women inclusivity literature. Similar results were confirmed in the past literature as well: in other contexts such as online discussions, gender inclusivity and making others feel ignored is an important aspect not only in the workplace or specific to genders, but in online communication and discussion settings as well (Gefen et al., 2007).
Limitations
The data is based on discussants being students in a class situation. The sample happens to be a convenience sample. Therefore, this paper neither claims any causality or correlational validity nor generalizability of the results. While this is a limitation, we may point out that the sample used in this case study is appropriate because the sample consists of several working entrepreneurs or working full-time adults as described in the sample characteristics. Secondly, discussions about women's inclusivity must happen inside the classroom where the message about women's inclusivity is effectively conveyed to the adults who are in the workforce or will be entering the workforce soon. When these students go into the workforce, the workforce progressively becomes more aware of the need for the social inclusivity of all genders, especially women overlooked in general. The participant interviews on their modified approach with being gender-aware and including women in the classroom and outside in their work reinforce that awareness about inclusivity is effective.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
