How women entrepreneurs disrupt the traditional culture and economy: The case of women technology entrepreneurs in Lebanon

Entrepreneurship has been traditionally investigated and explained from an economic perspective. In addition, mainstreaming gender-blind research has resulted in understanding entrepreneurship in masculine terms and associating it with male attributes such as risk-taking, aggression, and competitiveness. As shown in the literature e.g. (Ahl, 2006) despite policy support to increase women’s participation in entrepreneurship, one of the main inhibiting factors remains to be the understanding of entrepreneurship based on socially constructed masculine stereotypes. This is why researching women entrepreneurs and expanding the definition of entrepreneurship to include the understanding of how they view themselves and define their success in this domain is crucial. There is a rising field of women entrepreneurship research, especially in developing countries. In Lebanon, there has been a rise in women entrepreneurship training programs both in the urban and rural areas due to increased interest from the academic and civil society sector in this topic. Nevertheless, and although several studies have been done about women entrepreneurs, few took place in the Levant region in the Middle East and even fewer in the technology domain. To address this gap, this research aims to gain a good understanding of women entrepreneurs in technology in Lebanon within the specific context and environment that they operate and live in. Like the majority of research studies tackling female entrepreneurship in the MENA region, a qualitative methodology was adopted where in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted to study fifteen female tech-entrepreneurs in Lebanon. This research answers the calls in the gendered entrepreneurship literature for adopting a social constructionist perspective in entrepreneurship research, using a gender-aware framework in researching women entrepreneurs, and contextualising women entrepreneurship research according to culture and self-perceptions. This research pays attention to gender construction while not focusing on comparing men and women. Using a gendered lens, findings concerning the progress and impact of the women's ventures were highlighted using the interviewees’ own criteria.