Chapter 4: Female Entrepreneurship in Germany: Context, Development and its Reflection in German Media

In Germany, fostering female entrepreneurship is viewed as one of the solutions to fulfill the aim of increasing the overall level of entrepreneurship. As in many other countries, it is believed that a higher level of entrepreneurship would reduce the level of unemployment. In this context, the discourse on female entrepreneurship plays an important role in structuring our perception of entrepreneurial reality and in transmitting female entrepreneurship as something desired by society. Newspapers are an important means to transmit cultural values and ideas. Therefore, we conduct a discourse analysis of newspaper texts to investigate how female entrepreneurship is reflected in the German media. We analyze the discourse around the concept of “female entrepreneur” (Unternehmerin) as presented in two prominent German newspapers, the Welt, a conservative paper and the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a more leftist paper, between 1995 and 2001. We link the discourse to the overall entrepreneurship environment and its developments in the same time frame. The discourse is strongly embedded not only as an economic topic, but also as a cultural topic. An increasing prominence of female entrepreneurs in the articles reflects the growing public interest in the topic of female entrepreneurship. This also is apparent in the strong focus on positive role models of successful female entrepreneurs, although here the language used often reinforces more traditional roles. Our findings might have implications for policy makers as they point to gaps between discourse and policy objectives.