Job titles of new women entrepreneurs: navigating stereotypes through identity negotiation

Purpose Job titles help individuals define and express their careers to themselves and others. However, women initiating entrepreneurial careers face gendered stereotypes when choosing job titles. This study explores how new women entrepreneurs negotiate identity claims, including navigating stereotypes, when choosing job titles. Prior research oversimplifies job-title choice by attributing it to isolated factors, thus neglecting the complexity of identity negotiation. Design/methodology/approach Using a qualitative, abductive approach, the study draws on in-depth interviews with 44 new women entrepreneurs in the United States across diverse industries. Through the iterative process of coding and analysis of the data, a process framework of job-title choice, utilizing identity negotiation theory, is developed. Findings Five distinct but interacting elements are used as women navigate job-title choice: identity, titles, context, motives and post-use. Gendered stereotypes influence both environment and job title, which highlights their pervasive nature. New women entrepreneurs are both strategic and agentic when negotiating entrepreneurial identity through job-title choice. Further, what is not viable for one woman is optimal for another, illustrating important nuances and the social situatedness of title choice and surfacing how the unexamined normalization of “entrepreneur” contributes to exclusionary boundaries that privilege stereotypically aligned identities. Originality/value The study responds to calls for deeper focus on contextual specificities of entrepreneurial identity. Using an identity negotiation theory lens, new insights emerge on how the identity work of job-title choice allows strategic and agentic navigation of entrepreneurship stereotypes, emphasizing the interaction of five elements. The research challenges perspectives that view job titles as static identity labels and cast gendered stereotypes as deterministically limiting. It further contests the assumption that stereotype-based identity threats yield only stereotype adherence or avoidance, demonstrating instead that women's responses reflect more nuanced processes of identity negotiation. In doing so, the study advances identity negotiation theory within entrepreneurship and reframes women entrepreneurs as strategic, agentic actors who actively navigate, reinterpret and reshape the meanings and uses of job titles, both as a continuous identity work process and in response to gendered entrepreneurial stereotypes.