Academic Entrepreneurship – Gendered Discourses and Ghettos

In this paper, based on texts on academic entrepreneurship as well as on interviews with teachers and researchers at two Swedish universities, we will explore how local discourses of academic entrepreneurship are constructed and gendered. We see this as an important basis when discussing how gender mainstreaming interventions can be introduced in the complex and elusive arena of academic entrepreneurship. Swedish and international higher education is in the process of changing identity; from state-financed monopolies to more selffinanced institutions. In addition to competing for students and research funding, the universities are to contribute to economic growth by, for example, cooperating with industry and commercialize research results. It is a global discourse, providing 'rules' for ways of speaking and writing about academic entrepreneurship and it affects the way research and science is looked upon, both within and outside academia. It also provides material for gendered practices and social constructions of women as entrepreneurs and as researchers. Our findings show for example that in texts promoting academic entrepreneurship pictures of men address both women and men, while pictures of women are only targeted to women, often found in 'entrepreneurial ghettos' at the university and conceptualized as in need of support, as less risk-willing and less willing to commercialize their research. Notwithstanding that a discourse might be global, however, it is not always hegemonic, as it competes with alternative discourses and is translated and modified to adapt to local discourses and practices. This is particularly evident within academia, which is characterized by powerful and often contradictory discourses. Our findings show that the global entrepreneurial discourse is met by both counteracting and contributory discourses in academia. For example, it is true that academic entrepreneurship and other types of managerial ideas imposed on academia are seen as important, but also as jeopardizing the core values of academia, such as the idea of independent research and collegial decision making and autonomy. At the same time, Swedish society, including academia, is subject to the discourse of gender equality. Universities have for example been pointed out by the government for not doing enough to increase the number of women professors and as a result, a number of gender mainstreaming measures and projects have been introduced at the universities. As a consequence also projects on for example academic entrepreneurship are to deal with the issue of gender equality and to present measures to in this case increase the number of women entrepreneurs. Notwithstanding that gender equality is seen an important goal, at least on a rhetorical level, such projects and interventions tend to ignore that both academia and discourses of gender equality, entrepreneurship, innovation, and triple helix are gendered. Our findings show that there is a clear risk that interventions aimed at supporting 'women entrepreneurs' instead of leading to fundamental organizational and cultural changes reproduce and reinforce the image of the successful male academic entrepreneur. One problem addressed in this paper is how to design gender mainstreaming interventions without reproducing stereotypes. We believe the solution is not gender neutrality, but to move back and forth between structural approaches and more critical constructionist approaches.