Are women entrepreneurs more androgynous than men entrepreneurs? A comparative content analysis of language used by Shark Tank India Judges

ABSTRACT

Despite a significant increase in the number of women entrepreneurs in India, it remains a gendered profession. In this study, we aim to re-examine gender dynamics in entrepreneurship by using language as an interpretative tool to assess entrepreneurs’ psychological characteristics – motives, values, and linguistic styles. There has been a lack of academic research that focuses on successful women entrepreneurs. To address this, we specifically focused on seven entrepreneurs, who appeared as judges on Shark Tank India, Season One. Using computer-aided text analysis (LIWC software), we content-analysed 571 Tweets, 328 LinkedIn posts, and 13 media interaction videos (total 436:38 minutes), resulting in 912 individual observations. Results showed evidence of gender maturity in entrepreneurship, suggesting that women entrepreneurs had androgynous stable dispositions of both masculine and feminine characteristics. However, analysis of the media interactions showed that women entrepreneurs are significantly higher on affiliation motive as compared to their counterparts. This paradoxical situation validates the socio-cultural embeddedness where the perceptive portrayal of Indian women entrepreneurs as communal continues to be rooted in deep gender-bias. Interestingly, in terms of language usage, we found that women employed more masculine language than men, facilitating their entry and acceptance in a male-dominated profession.

KEYWORDS:

• Entrepreneurship
• gender
• language
• content-analysis
• Shark Tank

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the Editor-in-Chief and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions, which helped to improve the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In 2023, Twitter was renamed to X. However, for the purpose of this paper, we will retain the term ‘Twitter’ in reference.