Contemporary scholarship recognises the growing importance of entrepreneurship globally, and increasingly acknowledges that entrepreneurship is a gendered phenomenon. As a consequence, research in the area of gender and entrepreneurship has attracted considerable attention from researchers, practitioners and policy makers in recent years, and its theoretical reach has extended beyond the traditional commercial/for-profit sector into social and non-profit ventures. In light of this, our chapter considers why adopting a gendered perspective in social entrepreneurship is both important and timely. We provide an overview of how gender is conceptualised in social entrepreneurship, consider key contemporary themes in the gender and social entrepreneurship literatures, and map out some new research directions for future scholars that could potentially add value to the field and enhance understanding of gender and social entrepreneurial endeavour.

This chapter critically explores how gender is conceptualized in extant innovation research scholarship. The authors analyse a selection of published research articles, categorizing them according to the various themes adopted: traditional innovation and definitional issues; management styles, performance and teams; organisational structures and networks; and gendered stereotypes, feminist resistance, and gendered processes of innovation. The chapter also considers how researchers define innovation, and how they illustrate the relationship between gender and innovation. Findings indicate that published scholarship in this field lacks a robust discussion of the relationship between gender and innovation, with few articles positioning themselves within specific gender perspectives. The field has become restricted to the extent that only male innovation norms are studied and highlighted. The authors conclude that innovation research is lagging behind in terms of its perspectives on how gender is ‘done’, compared to other fields such as entrepreneurship where feminist epistemology is more developed. Avenues worthy of future research are identified.