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Women entrepreneurs face a double bind when performing emotions. Showing emotions associated with femininity, such as care, vulnerability, and embodied experiences, may align with women's role expectations but contradict those of entrepreneurial role expectations. Yet, suppressing such emotions also invites penalties for violating gender expectations. While existing research has extensively investigated gendered role incongruity and strategies to mitigate bias, it has not examined how emotions are involved in performing these roles. Thus, less is known about how women entrepreneurs navigate this double-bind tension through emotional performance, especially in contexts where emotions are deemed important. This study addresses this gap by examining how women in Femtech navigate the double-bind tension through various emotional performances on LinkedIn, a platform where actors enact masculine-coded behaviors. Using multimodal analysis of 80 highly representative LinkedIn posts, we identify three strategies for navigating the double bind through emotional performances. The study reveals that, rather than being bound and restricted by the double bind, women in Femtech work through it to make feminine-coded emotions visible, receivable, and legitimate within gendered entrepreneurship discourse. This study contributes to gender and entrepreneurship research by showing how women in Femtech actively navigate the entrepreneurial double bind through multimodal emotional performances.

This thesis is phenomenon-driven research, starting with the Femtech phenomenon – a feminine-coded context where women’s embodied experiences are central to almost all aspects of Femtech ventures, from business ideas and user and market insights to innovations that may influence their entrepreneurial practices. It examines how entrepreneurial actors do gender and do entrepreneurship in this unconventional context. Gender and entrepreneurship research has long shown that entrepreneurship is shaped by masculine norms, forming gendered expectations of rationality, autonomy, growth, disembodiment, emotional control, and heroic individualism. This thesis departs from this and asks: what happens when entrepreneurial practice is organized around experiences that such norms have long treated as private, vulnerable, and marginal? Rather than examining Femtech merely as an empirical background, the thesis treats it as an analytically important context for understanding how masculine entrepreneurship may be challenged, redirected, and potentially reconfigured.

The thesis is based on four qualitative studies that examine different angles of the same phenomenon. Paper 1 provides a broad processual view by showing how women entrepreneurs in Femtech move beyond evaluative dependency through processes of subverting, feminizing, and two pathways of splintering and coalescing. Paper 2 examines how women entrepreneurs mobilize narratives of embodied experiences to resist the discourse of invulnerability and disembodiment in entrepreneurship. Paper 3 turns to emotional performance through a multimodal approach, showing how women entrepreneurial actors navigate the double-bind tension on LinkedIn, a masculine-enacted professional platform, by making feminine-coded emotions visible, receivable, and legitimate. Since women’s embodied experiences become foundational, Paper 4 examines male entrepreneurs in Femtech who are disconnected from the experiences of the context, to explore how they perform authenticity, not drawing from individual claims as in other masculinized contexts, but instead, construct contextual authenticity.

The thesis develops the concept of doing otherwise to explain how entrepreneurial actors in Femtech do gender and do entrepreneurship differently by working through the normative tension between masculine entrepreneurship norms and women’s embodied experiences. Doing otherwise does not imply a complete transformation of entrepreneurship or the replacement of masculine norms with feminine ones. Instead, it refers to a partial, situated, and relational process in which masculine norms persist yet are destabilized in the Femtech context when entrepreneurial practices are organized around women’s embodied experiences. The thesis further conceptualizes weaving otherwise as the broader process through which different forms of doing otherwise become connected and mutually reinforcing. Together, they contribute to the partial remaking of entrepreneurship within Femtech: women’s embodied experiences become a foundation for entrepreneurial practice, alternative practices become visible and actionable, and external actors must perform authenticity when they are disconnected from the context’s experiential foundation.

The thesis contributes to gender and entrepreneurship research by showing how women’s embodied experiences can serve as grounds for doing otherwise, thereby destabilizing masculine norms within Femtech. It also contributes to contextual entrepreneurship by identifying experiential foundation as an important dimension of context construction. Third, it contributes to emerging research on Femtech entrepreneurship by conceptualizing Femtech as an entrepreneurial field of normative redirection, rather than merely a stigmatized market, social-change arena, or female-typed industry.

Geobacter species are common in iron-rich environments and can contribute to formation of methylmercury (MeHg), a neurotoxic compound with high bioaccumulation potential formed as a result of bacterial and archaeal physiological activity. Geobacter sulfurreducens can utilize various electron acceptors for growth including iron hydroxides or fumarate. However, it remains poorly understood how the growth on these compounds affects physiological properties of bacterial cells in biofilms, including the capacity to produce MeHg. The purpose of this study was to determine changes in the biochemical composition of G. sulfurreducens during biofilm cultivation in media containing iron hydroxide or fumarate, and to quantify mercury (Hg) methylation capacity of the formed biofilms. Biofilms were characterized by Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy in the attenuated total reflection mode (ATR-FTIR), Resonance Raman spectroscopy and confocal laser scanning microscopy. MeHg formation was quantified by mass spectrometry after incubation of biofilms with 100 nM Hg. The results of ATR-FTIR experiments showed that in presence of fumarate, G. sulfurreducens biofilm formation was accompanied by variation in content of the energy-reserve polymer glycogen over time, which could be cancelled by the addition of supplementary nutrients (yeast extract). In contrast, biofilms cultivated on Fe(III) hydroxide did not accumulate glycogen. The ATR-FTIR results further suggested that Fe(III) hydroxide surfaces bind cells via phosphate and carboxylate groups of bacteria that form complexes with iron. Furthermore, biofilms grown on Fe(III) hydroxide had higher fraction of oxidized cytochromes and produced two to three times less biomass compared to conditions with fumarate. Normalized to biofilm volume, the content of MeHg was similar in assays with biofilms grown on Fe(III) hydroxide and on fumarate (with yeast extract and without). These results suggest that G. sulfurreducens biofilms produce MeHg irrespectively from glycogen content and cytochrome redox state in the cells, and warrant further investigation of the mechanisms controlling this process.

Effective and economical carbon dioxide-methane separation (CO2/CH4) is highly desirable in several industries such as sweetening natural gases and renewable natural gas (RNG) from biogas and landfills. Among the different separation technologies, membrane separation has been shown to have lower cost of production and lower CH4 losses. In this study, Zeolitic Imidazole Frameworks (ZIF-8) crystals with sizes varying from 45 nm to 450 nm were synthesized and incorporated in the polymer of intrinsic microporosity, PIM-1, to form mixed matrix membranes (MMMs). The structure, morphology, and physicochemical properties of the MMMs were characterized by 1H NMR, FTIR, XRD, TGA, and SEM. ZIF-8 crystal size was controlled using the concentration of sodium formate. The influence of the ZIF-8 crystal size on MMMs was studied by sorption, gas permeability, and aging of the membranes. The MMMs with ZIF-8 crystals of 120 nm particle diameter yielded the greatest improvement in gas transport properties; the CO2/CH4 selectivity-CO2 permeability was 11.4 and 9700 Barrer compared to PIM-1 with 6.4 and 9300 Barrer respectively. The former is near the Robeson 2008 upper bound, while PIM-1 is on the 1991 upper bound. After 40 days of aging, selectivity increased and permeability decreased; the changes were parallel to the Robeson upper bounds indicating increased polymer packing and diffusivity selectivity.

Entrepreneurship research has shown that authenticity is unequally distributed because the figure of the authentic entrepreneur is conventionally aligned with masculine norms. Yet this literature tends to assume that masculine fit travels across contexts. We challenge this assumption by examining how male founders perform authenticity in Femtech, a context organized around women’s embodied health experiences that male founders do not personally share. Drawing on Discursive Psychology analysis of interviews with eight male founders, we show that they initially rely on individual authenticity claims grounded in technical expertise, entrepreneurial competence, and market rationality. These claims allow them to appear as competent entrepreneurs, but they become unstable when the context’s experiential foundation becomes salient. In response, male founders narrate experiential proximity to women’s embodied experiences by decentering themselves and transferring authority to women. We theorize this movement as contextual authenticity: an attempt to perform authenticity not by proving who one is or what one has, but by showing how one relates to experiences relevant to the context’s experiential foundation. The study contributes to research on authenticity in entrepreneurship by showing how authenticity is shaped by context-specific experiential foundations rather than individual attributes alone. It also contributes to gender and entrepreneurship research by recasting male advantage as contextually contingent: men may retain field-level entrepreneurial fit while lacking context-level authenticity in settings where authenticity rests on experiences they cannot directly claim.

Women entrepreneurs are subjected to dominant gendered evaluations. We examine what happens when women build ventures in a context where gendered evaluations do not value its experiential foundations. Drawing on a longitudinal qualitative study, we develop a process model that explains how women reduce evaluative dependency by subverting dominant practices and feminizing the basis on which entrepreneurial activity is supported and assessed. The interaction of these practices generates an alternative evaluative infrastructure through which women participate in shaping arrangements that guide entrepreneurial evaluation. Our findings conceptualize evaluation as an ongoing organizational process that those being evaluated can challenge and reorganize.  

Entrepreneurship discourse tends to privilege disembodiment, rationality, and invulnerability, thereby excluding narratives of women’s embodied experiences. Drawing on the Butlerian approach to vulnerability and resistance (Butler 2016; Gilson 2011), this study argues that entrepreneurship discourse favors invulnerability and examines how women entrepreneurs mobilize narratives of embodied experiences to challenge the masculine discourse of invulnerability. Drawing on 78 selected interviews with various Femtech entrepreneurial actors featured on specialized Femtech podcasts on the Spotify platform from 2022 to 2024, I identify three interconnected discursive acts through which women mobilize narratives of embodied experiences to challenge the discourse of invulnerability: 1) breaking the silence of “epistemology of ignorance”, 2) authorizing embodied experiences as entrepreneurial expertise, and 3) asserting discursive authority beyond accommodation. The study contributes to feminist entrepreneurship literature by demonstrating that vulnerability, when exposed through narratives of embodied experiences, enables discursive resistance rather than an individual condition that must be concealed. Additionally, it offers a framework showing how women construct counternarratives that assert, rather than negotiate, discursive authority within entrepreneurship.