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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.

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. 

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.