Female entrepreneurship in Brazil: how scientific literature shapes the sociocultural construction of gender inequalities

Abstract

The study describes that gender conceptions, understanding what is considered masculine or feminine, have impacted the women’s activity named entrepreneurship. Attention is drawn to the fact that in Latin languages, such as the Portuguese language, there is a predominance of grammatical sexism, using male predicates to indicate male gender as well as human gender. In that scenario, this paper presents a literature review focused on female entrepreneurship in Brazil by gathering 88 articles in English and Portuguese from the following bibliographic sources: ProQuest, Web of Science, and Lilacs. The data were categorised and analysed using R, a software environment for statistical computing. In that regard, a text-mining analysis has been carried out by adopting the statistical package Iramuteq for performing assisted lexicometrical analysis. The overall frequency of linguistic utterances (explorative statistics), a simplified factor analysis about absolute frequency (word cloud), and a hierarchical descendant classification of stable lexical classes are used. Results indicate that even when the topic is women’s entrepreneurship, female terms are not mentioned or considered when discussing entrepreneurship and its professional aspects. It seems that it is necessary to listen to the voice of women if the literature intends to produce knowledge about entrepreneurship in Brazil in the way it promotes impact and social relevance.