“Dig Your Heels in the Ground and Get What You Deserve.” - An Exploratory Corpus-Assisted Study of Women Entrepreneurs’ Blogs.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7146/hjlcb.vi64.146624Keywords:
blogs, businesswomen, business communication, corpus linguistics, female entrepreneurs, keywords, women entrepreneurs, women entrepreneurs’ blogsAbstract
Throughout history, entrepreneurial contributions of women have been largely disregarded and undervalued in the business sector. However, recent decades have witnessed increased visibility of women entrepreneurs striving to challenge gender-based inequities and systemic biases in the workplace. Those who have achieved success are increasingly willing to share their experiences and insights, providing guidance to aspiring women seeking to establish, develop, or advance their enterprises and careers. One notable channel to convey their messages is through women entrepreneurs’ blogs. This paper explores how female entrepreneurs perceive themselves as businesswomen and examines how they construct the position of women in the current business realm. Using a Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis approach, a detailed examination of concordances related to selected keywords and key expressions associated with the perception of women entrepreneurs, along with business and societal challenges, unveils typical collocations and contextual usage. The analysis is based on the Women Entrepreneurs’ Blog Corpus, a dataset comprising 329,896 words from 318 unique blog entries in English published between 2019 and 2023. The findings reveal that blogs serve as empowering platforms where women challenge traditional narratives, reshape perceptions of entrepreneurship, and redefine their roles in the business world. The usage of frequently occurring keywords such as female, women, and mompreneur(s), emphasises themes of resilience, motivation, and identity alongside issues like inferiority, lack of confidence, and systemic disadvantages, particularly for women of color. Moreover, keywords like imposter syndrome, self-doubt, glass ceiling, and male-dominated often appear in contexts that underscore overcoming obstacles and the benefits of female entrepreneurship.
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