Fix Thyself: Un/Doing Confidence in Women's Entrepreneurship

Abstract

Are women at work really lacking confidence? Recent books and videos addressing women's presumed lack of confidence suggest that women can achieve success if they work on their confidence. This is also true for women entrepreneurs, who are regularly encouraged to be more confident than they appear to be. In this paper, we explore how confidence is articulated and how it operates to shape women entrepreneurs in a triple-layered innovation ecosystem context comprising women entrepreneurs, innovation hub managers, and policy managers. Thereby, we move beyond the individual subject (the woman entrepreneur) to problematize the context in which confidence is constructed as essential for women entrepreneurs. Drawing on interview, text, and video analysis, we show that confidence is ingrained in postfeminist neoliberal discourses of masculine entrepreneurship, which operate in the innovation system and function to individualize women's responsibility for addressing the challenges they encounter. Yet, we show that confidence is a discourse that is often resisted by women through collective practices of care, resistance to unkind practices, and by collectivizing the need to “fix thyself.”