Doing, redoing, or undoing gender of women tech founders in Germany

Abstract The study focuses on German tech startups, scrutinizing what visibility women founders consider important . In this respect, to what extent they perceive “visibility” in a gendered way is particularly striking. Consequently, we ask what women founders actively do to create a particular gender-(in)dependent visibility : how do they locate themselves in the three-way interplay of reproducing the dualism of masculinity–femininity (doing gender), restructuring it (redoing gender), or eliminating it (undoing gender)? Via our dataset of 20 qualitative interviews with all-women or mixed-gender founding teams, we divide the results of our inductive analysis into gender-independent and gender-dependent dimensions. While the women founders primarily do not understand “visibility as a startup” as gendered at the organizational level, gendered self-images at the individual level exist. Organizational visibility is shaped by phases, target groups, and instruments. For individual, gender-dependent visibility, we find the three ideal types of the (internal or external) feminist, the pragmatic strategist, and the gender neutrality advocate. We link our empirical findings to the opportunities and challenges of doing, redoing, and undoing gender, showing that women tech founders are actively undoing gender in many areas. Our research provides linkages to current debates in women’s entrepreneurship literature, such as entrepreneurial identity or discourses of hypervisibility. Moreover, we deliver practical implications on how to gear women-specific networks, accelerators, and the like toward the actual needs of women founders.