Working on a gender perspective for entrepreneurship education: an exercise in educational innovation for complexity

Abstract

The changes and unexpected phenomena that we had experience as a society demand solutions that allow effective decision making within complex scenarios. Entrepreneurial education should be understood as an effort to develop entrepreneurial skills and attitudes. It is therefore very important that educators, academics and decision makers in the higher education environment to adopt and inclusive perspective. The objective of this paper is to document an exercise in educational innovation design to initiate the work of approaching a complex environment that leads to consider a gender perspective in entrepreneurship education. Entrepreneurship education is associated with business creation, the development of job skills, increased self-confidence and, above all, the recognition of opportunities for the generation of new ventures (Tiberius, V & Weyland, 2022). Although it has been recognized that female entrepreneurs contribute to economic growth, wealth creation, innovation and employment, their economic participation, is limited by various structural barriers - economic, legal, social, cultural and educational (Wu et al., 2019 ). For a better understand of a gender perspective in the context of entrepreneurship education, it is necessary to incorporate concepts of diversity and equality (Orser & Elliot, 2022). Although the need for more inclusive education at all educational levels has been highlighted, one of the main challenges that organizations face when designing, delivering and evaluating educational courses is deciding the best paths to take actions (WEI, 2022). In this sense one of the educational innovations identified by Ramírez-Montoya and Lugo-Ocando, 2020, addresses the socio-cultural domain, which focuses on the socio-cultural environment in which the educational process takes place. Furthermore, these authors note the importance of approaching all educational innovations in a holistic and inclusive manner. The exercise presented in this paper focuses on a socio-cultural educational innovation, specifically a workshop that was designed and implemented within an entrepreneurship festival at the city of Queretaro, Mexico. The recipients of this workshop were designers, professors and students in entrepreneurship training programs. They were given a framework for reflection and learning about the gender perspective considering two aspects: first, towards the sensitization of an inclusive, equitable and diverse gender perspective that transforms the design of training programs and second, towards the establishment of a route to combat stereotypes and unconscious biases. Although this exercise has been brief and limited, we consider that we have achieved a step towards an understanding of the challenges involved in working with a gender perspective in entrepreneurship training. It is important to emphasize a couple of valuable discoveries, firstly the different profiles of the participants, from teachers, activists and students, which allowed us to capture the perspectives not only of the training decision makers, designers and evaluators, but also from the point of view of those who live and support the training process. Second, a reduced number of participants created an atmosphere of closeness and trust on the part of the attendees and a more direct guidance by the instructors.