On Gendered Justification: A Framework for Understanding Men's and Women's Entrepreneurial Resource-Acquisition

Studies of gender in entrepreneurship acknowledge that gender norms are at the root of women’s disadvantage in resource-acquisition but provide limited guidance on how societal (macro-level) norms and their gendering influence entrepreneurs’ micro-level behaviours and stakeholders’ decisions within local contexts. To address this lacuna, we draw on gender theory and French Pragmatist Sociology (FPS) to offer G-FPS: an analytical and methodological framework of resource-claiming as a process of justifying, engaging and testing, embedded in normative context that constructs gender roles and social worth. Through analysis of a historical case of business resource-acquisition in pre-state Israel, we theorize and demonstrate how local gendered norms steered men and women to diverge in their justifications and self-presentation when making their claims, and how stakeholders evaluated those claims according to their fit with situated gender expectations. We thus illustrate how macro-level gender norms infiltrate and operate within micro-level processing, persistently favouring men over women.