This study examines how institutionalised patriarchal norms within family businesses reproduce gendered exclusion and how excluded daughters transform this exclusion into entrepreneurial agency. It explores how women cultivate resilience and entrepreneurial identity to reclaim legitimacy and reimagine legacy within Nigerian family enterprises.
Drawing on qualitative interview data from 26 female founder-CEOs, analysed using the Gioia methodology, the study develops an empirically grounded interpretive model showing how gendered exclusion can operate as both a structural constraint and a catalyst for transformation.
The findings indicate a recurring three-part narrative pattern: (1) cultural legitimation of exclusion, (2) resilience as reorientation and (3) entrepreneurial reclamation of legacy. Excluded daughters respond to institutionalised exclusion through emotional reframing, educational advancement and entrepreneurial venture creation, transforming marginalisation into legitimacy, leadership and symbolic inclusion.
The study's focus on Nigeria provides deep contextual insight but limits transferability. Future research should examine how similar mechanisms of gendered exclusion and adaptive agency unfold across other patriarchal and Global South contexts. Another line of research could consider the conative processes linking entrepreneurial motivation and behaviour.
The findings highlight the need for organisations, policymakers and family business leaders to challenge culturally legitimised gender hierarchies, adopt institutional reforms that challenge gendered authority and legitimacy structures, while also supporting women's entrepreneurial pathways as mechanisms of equality and empowerment.
The study advances equality and diversity scholarship by theorising that while resilience may be an individual trait, it is contextually induced and structurally activated and by showing how women transform exclusion into continuity through entrepreneurship. It shows how gendered inequality within organisations may give rise to alternative forms of leadership, legitimacy and legacy.
