My doctoral research is about how gender affects research and knowledge-based entrepreneurship in Finland and Turkey. I aim to analyze the inequalities that women entrepreneurs face because of gender ideologies and their strategies to overcome inequalities in the research and innovation sector. My general aim is to bring out the women entrepreneurs’ experiences related to structural and interactional constraints and analyze their experiences in terms of similarities and differences. Throughout the conferences and doctoral courses I’ve attended, the main question asked about my research is “why I compare Finland and Turkey since they have very different cultural routes in terms of gender equality debates.” As Ahl (2006) argues, a comparison between countries with different socio-cultural backgrounds gives more global perspectives to understand better common features and crucial differences of women entrepreneurs among countries. For example, Finland is often regarded as already achieved gender equality, but according to the European Commission Statistics on research and innovation, only 17.3% of private-sector researchers are women. Despite being influenced by the intensive religio-conservative gender climate for the last few decades (Günes-Ayata and Doğangün 2017), the proportion of women researchers in the private sector is 24.4% in Turkey. As the statistics show, regardless of country, women researchers are significantly under-represented in the research and innovation sectors, leading to a gender gap in technology-based firm creation.
For this study, I interviewed 29 women entrepreneurs (16 from Turkey and 13 from Finland). There are surprising similarities between Finnish and Turkish participants’ experiences in the highly gendered sector. In my next blog post, I would like to discuss my findings.
Demet Demirez,
PhD Student at Tampere University, associated with Nordwit
References:
Ahl, H. (2006). Why Research on Women Entrepreneurs Needs New Directions. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 30(5), 595-621.
Güneş-Ayata, A.,Doğangün, G. (2017). Gender Politics of the AKP: Restoration of a Religio-Conservative Gender Climate. Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, 19(6), 610-627.
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