This study investigates how women technology entrepreneurs build the resilience to navigate and persist within hyper-masculinised business incubator environments. It focuses on how formative experiences contribute to the development of resilience, and how these psychological and developmental factors interact to shape women's decisions to pursue entrepreneurship and their ability to overcome gendered challenges within entrepreneurial ecosystems.
Based on 25 life story interviews with women technology entrepreneurs, we show how experiences of early adversity can function as an emotional and psychological “training ground” for navigating later adversity. These experiences enable women withstand and negotiate the layered gendered challenges embedded in entrepreneurial ecosystems.
We reconceptualize resilience as a dynamic, developmental process shaped by trauma, biography, and meaning-making, rather than as a fixed trait or reactive response. Our analysis makes four key contributions. First, to entrepreneurship theory, by extending understandings of women's entrepreneurial pathways to include early formative experiences. Second, to resilience theory, by conceptualising sexism as a form of gendered trauma. Third, to entrepreneurial ecosystem research by showing that biographically developed resilience is relationally activated, tested and reshaped within ecosystems. Finally, to qualitative methodology, by demonstrating how life story interviews can uncover hidden developmental trajectories that underpin entrepreneurial persistence.
Theoretically, our study extends understandings of resilience as a processual phenomenon by identifying trauma and sexism as formative experiences and showing how adversity, negotiation and identity reconstruction interact over time. Divergent pathways to resilience underscore the need for more nuanced, contextualised understandings of its development. Methodologically, we demonstrate how life story interviews can uncover hidden developmental trajectories underpinning entrepreneurial persistence. While retrospective interpretive data cannot claim statistical generalizability, they offer rich insight enabling theoretical and analytical generalization.
Rather than trying to “fix” the women by offering more training, incubator and accelerator managers should focus on redesigning these environments to reduce the need for resilience in the first place. Managers should attend to the quality and content of relations rather than merely providing more access to mentors, role models and networks. Policymakers should move beyond participation targets to embed inclusion in ecosystem governance, evaluation, and accountability.
This paper makes visible how women technology entrepreneurs develop the emotional and psychological capacities that allow them to persist through ongoing gendered adversity in male-dominated environments.
