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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.