‘Surfing on the ironing board’ – the representation of women's entrepreneurship in German newspapers

Abstract

Despite extensive attempts to enhance women's entrepreneurship in Germany, a gender gap continues to exist. This article sets out to analyse the representation of women's entrepreneurship in German media, by analysing how it is depicted in newspapers and how this changes over time. Images transported in media might regulate the nature of women's entrepreneurship, as they contain information about ‘typical’ and ‘socially desirable’ behaviour of women as well as of entrepreneurs. This article contributes to developing an understanding of the relevance of media representation of the entrepreneurship phenomenon for influencing the propensity towards entrepreneurial activity.

Keywords:

• women's entrepreneurship
• newspapers
• Germany

Notes

Notes

1. Due to i.e. time-lags of causes on effects as well as the interrelatedness of different factors contributing directly and/or indirectly to the career choice of potential entrepreneurs, such cause-and-effect relationship is impossible to operationalize and quantify.

2. Data come from GENESIS ONLINE, an online database of the Federal Statistical Office (2006) in Germany (https://www.genesis.destatis.de/genesis/online/logon). The most recent data available are for all of Germany and the year 2007.

3. Based on the so-called ‘Ehegattensplitting’ (spousal income splitting system), married couples may choose joint assessment for their taxes. Both incomes are added up and halved to determine tax progression. Thus, the basic tax-free allowance for one-income married couples is doubled.

4. The Frankfurter Rundschau had to be excluded from the analysis. Their archive is only available on yearly CD ROMs. It turned out to be impossible to purchase a complete set of these CD ROMs, as the archive for different years was sold out and neither the newspaper publishers nor the university libraries had them available. Therefore, it was not possible for us to gain access to data for all years for this newspaper, and in consequence it was excluded from the sample.

5. The large number of articles could be handled only because around 40% of the articles were short news notices.

6. We checked for and excluded articles that appeared both in the general and the specific search from the sample.

7. As Dodd (2002) noticed in her study, (male) entrepreneurs themselves like to draw on war metaphors to describe their activities.