This chapter focuses on individual-level aspects of inclusion in entrepreneurial ecosystems, using examples from gender-focused ecosystems research in Boston, Massachusetts, as part of broader research carried out by the authors between 2014 and 2017. Using data from fieldwork carried out in Boston, we outline how individual-level gender biases operate in entrepreneurial ecosystems and how they impact women entrepreneurs differently than male entrepreneurs. Our focus is explicitly on the gendering of social capital and trust within entrepreneurial ecosystems, as we highlight their gendered dimensions which lead to exclusion for women, even if ‘unintentionally’.

The third chapter focuses explicitly on the relevance of gender for entrepreneurial ecosystems. The chapter first discusses the differences between sex, gender, and gender relations to lay the foundation for a dynamic understanding of actors and entrepreneurial ecosystems. Guided by feminist perspectives in entrepreneurship and sociology the chapter provides theoretical insights, derived from the various ways in which gender is studied, on how gender can be conceptualized and how inclusion is a multifaceted concept and practice. The chapter then offers a guiding definition of gender inclusion in relation to entrepreneurial ecosystems and moves on to provide insights about how to study it in relation to individuals, organizations, and sociocultural norms at the same time. In doing so, this chapter provides a multifactor and multilevel gender framework for understanding economic inclusion in relation to entrepreneurial ecosystems.

This chapter examines all three levels to present a holistic framework for understanding gender in relation to entrepreneurial ecosystems and policies for supporting inclusive economic development. It builds off the authors’ previous research in this area within the technology startup sector. The chapter provides effective approaches for building inclusive entrepreneurial ecosystems that range from individual approaches to organizational ones and, finally, to approaches by policymakers at local, state, and country levels. The chapter also outlines how gender should be an important dimension of policy efforts aimed at helping cities, states, and nations combat rising economic inequality in the midst of economic development efforts. More urgently, the impact of the ongoing pandemic is also examined given the gendered outcomes it will likely have on entrepreneurial success.

This chapter focuses on the city of Boston and delves into how intersectional differences among women entrepreneurs result in additional and different biasing forces for women of color and immigrant women entrepreneurs compared to White women engaging in entrepreneurship. As such, the chapter provides a holistic consideration of how gender, race, and other relations of difference may play out in experiences of entrepreneurship within entrepreneurial ecosystems. The chapter aims to provide a complex and holistic picture of how entrepreneurial ecosystems essentially provide very different experiences, interactions, and institutional support for actors in ecosystems, thereby supporting our argument that actors, even if in the same category, are indeed heterogeneous and not homogeneous.

The first chapter provides an overview of the rise and popularity of entrepreneurship as a practice and as a scholarly field of research. It notes how entrepreneurship has been shown to contribute positively to economic development and that scholarship related to supporting entrepreneurs through building robust entrepreneurial ecosystems is on the rise. Entrepreneurial ecosystems can be defined as a community of entrepreneurs engaged in reciprocal social and economic exchanges in the context of intermediary organizations, other actors, and institutions. Such research has focused on theory refinement as well as the development of metrics and ‘playbooks’ for communities that want to foster entrepreneurship. While policymakers are increasingly support building successful entrepreneurial ecosystems in their cities and states through public funding, there continues to be a dearth of research that addresses the relevance of gender for understanding and supporting entrepreneurial ecosystems. This chapter emphasizes the relevance and importance of a gender perspective for understanding how and why entrepreneurial ecosystems may not benefit female entrepreneurs in the same ways that they benefit male entrepreneurs. It provides insights into the ways a gender perspective can contribute to a new conceptual model of entrepreneurial ecosystems and eventually lead to effective policies for inclusive economic development.

This chapter shares examples of organization-level barriers to full participation of women in entrepreneurial ecosystems by way of the three cities that were the sites of our fieldwork—Boston, Massachusetts, St. Louis, Missouri, and Asheville, North Carolina. Here, the focus is on the ways in which intermediary organizations, such as incubators, accelerators, coworking spaces, and investors among others, can act as gatekeepers to the resources of the ecosystem. The chapter focuses specifically on access to networks, outreach, selection, support mechanisms (i.e., entrepreneur support organizations) available in the ecosystem, and ecosystem culture. In speaking to these issues, the chapter focuses on the role of meso-level organizational actors and how their norms, values, and practices differentially impact entrepreneurs and lead to inclusion or exclusion from the ecosystem.

The second chapter concentrates on the concept of entrepreneurial ecosystems, providing various ways to conceptualize and define it and then moving on to discuss its importance for supporting economic development. Given the growing body of work on entrepreneurial ecosystems, the chapter first outlines how the field of entrepreneurial ecosystems evolved from existing work on clusters and carries much of its assumptions around homogeneity of actors. In contrast to these assumptions, we demonstrate that actors are not homogenous but heterogeneous and that existing concepts of entrepreneurial ecosystems do not differentiate among entrepreneurs as actors within ecosystems. These arguments are further elaborated on with evidence in the chapters that follow.

This chapter outlines the importance and role of institutional factors in the analysis of entrepreneurial ecosystems, particularly in relation to gender. We focus explicitly on informal and formal factors—that is, belief systems as well as economic, political, and legal systems—as important considerations in how entrepreneurial ecosystems are organized and replicated. We conclude this chapter by introducing the concept of ‘ecosystem identity’ as a framework that offers a typology of ecosystems and thereby expands how scholarship attending to entrepreneurial ecosystems can conceptualize and categorize different types of ecosystem. Our goal here is to offer suggestions as to how the institutional organization and identity of an ecosystem can offer different mechanisms and drivers of change towards gender inclusion. We point out that ecosystem identity impacts the possibilities for change, and, on this basis, we offer insights as to challenges as well as opportunities for institutional shifts.