I had the pleasure of spending some time last week with members of the Gender and Enterprise Network (GEN) of the Institute for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (ISBE). I was attending a workshop entitled “Innovating Theory: Gendering and Extending Entrepreneurship Theory” with presentations by my awesome supervisor, the esteemed Prof. Susan Marlow, the pioneering gender and entrepreneurship scholar, Prof. Sara Carter of Strathclyde University, Prof Eleanor Shaw, also of Strathclyde, and Dr. Robert Smith, who is doing interesting and novel work on masculinities and entrepreneurship.

It was an excellent and thought-provoking couple of days, in particular for the sessions on future directions in entrepreneurship research, which included looking into entrepreneurial households and families, as well as  something that particularly excited me, which is exploring gender more widely, complicating it intersectionally, and challenging the heteronormative bias of research as it currently exists.

It also resulted in my joining the ISBE GEN committee as its inaugural Digital Communications Officer. This basically meant that I got to live-tweet the event (something I would have happily done anyway) and help build the group’s website (currently underway). I find it really refreshing to build relationships and network with other academics doing research in a similar area, as although we don’t always agree, you can say we “speak the same language.” I look forward to our future work together!