Female entrepreneurship in Brazil: how scientific literature shapes the sociocultural construction of gender inequalities

The paper addresses how scientific literature portrays female entrepreneurship in Brazil and the sociocultural implications of that discourse. It contextualizes rising women-led enterprises and the parallel increase in studies, noting that such research informs policy and financing yet women face fewer funding opportunities, tend to undertake out of necessity, and are concentrated in stereotypically feminine sectors (fashion, food, beauty, care). The authors highlight how grammatical sexism in Portuguese and other Latin languages normalizes masculine forms as generic/neutral, shaping perceptions of professions and reinforcing gendered divisions of labor. The study’s purpose is to critically examine how female entrepreneurship is described in scientific papers by analyzing abstracts from 88 articles (1999–2019), in English and Portuguese, to reveal underlying discursive patterns and social representations. Abstracts were chosen for their visibility and summary role, and corpora were processed separately by language to enable comparison.

The study itself is a literature review of 88 peer-reviewed papers on female entrepreneurship in Brazil, drawing from ProQuest, Web of Science, and Lilacs. Background literature referenced in the introduction indicates that Brazilian women entrepreneurs have less access to credit, often engage in necessity entrepreneurship, and are concentrated in traditionally feminine sectors, reflecting broader sociocultural and linguistic gender norms. Prior work is cited on how language and discourse construct gendered realities and perpetuate masculine-centric representations, situating the review within critical discourse and social representation frameworks.

Design: Qualitative literature review with text-mining/lexicometric analysis of abstracts from 88 publications (1999–2019) on female entrepreneurship in Brazil. Data sources: ProQuest, Web of Science, and Lilacs. Keywords used (English and Portuguese variants): female entrepreneurship in Brazil, women entrepreneurship in Brazil, Brazilian entrepreneurial women. Inclusion: Peer-reviewed papers addressing female entrepreneurship in Brazil; dissertations excluded. No specific exclusion criteria due to the few papers. Authors from Brazil and abroad included. Data: Abstracts collected and split into two corpora by language: English and Portuguese. Processing: Pre-processing removed demonstrative, indefinite, possessive, and additional adjectives; adverbs; articles; digits; conjunctions; onomatopoeia; pronouns; prepositions. Analytic software: Iramuteq (within R environment) for lexicometrical analysis. Main analyses: - Hierarchical Descending Classification (HDC) based on correspondence analysis with iterative bi-partitions maximizing inter-class inertia (X² tests across Elementary Units of Context). - Word Cloud Analysis (WCA) based on absolute frequency of lexical forms (simplified factor analysis without semantic proximity). Additional metrics: Lexical richness via type-token ratio (TTR); vocabulary size V (number of different forms) calculated per Reinert (1990). Corpus sizes: 37 English abstracts; 51 Portuguese abstracts. Identified forms: V=412 (Portuguese corpus), V=185 (English corpus). Frequencies reported include number of abstracts, total words, active/supplementary words, hapax (appearing once), and mean occurrences per text. Word tree/similitude analyses used to identify connectivity among terms. Analyses were conducted separately for the English and Portuguese corpora to allow comparative insights.

English-language corpus: - Two central terms emerged with different positions: “woman” (58 occurrences) and “female” (41 occurrences). - “Woman” was more frequent and associated with gender (42%), future (36%), and innovation (32%), highlighting a discourse about women’s role in modernization. - “Female” was linked to economic (42%), entrepreneurship (81%), and country (37%), suggesting a framing tied to national economic development and productivity. - Word cloud placed “woman” centrally, bifurcating links: lower half connected to gender (f28), country (f27), economic (f22), entrepreneurial (f27); upper half connected “female” (f41) to activity (f18), business (f36), and personality (f13), implying expectations of personality traits aligned with leadership roles. - HDC yielded five stable classes; the most representative was Class 4 (28%), characterized by terms such as result, gender, difference, personality, entrepreneurs, indicating that gender disparities among entrepreneurs are prominent themes. Portuguese-language corpus: - “Mulher” (woman) occurred 102 times across the corpus, whereas “fêmea” (female) occurred 39 times (noting “fêmea” is uncommon as a noun in Portuguese). - The masculine term “empreendedor” (entrepreneur) dominated with frequency 108, structuring the discursive universe and splitting it between clusters containing mulher (f102), pesquisa (f55), objetivo (f36) versus empresa (f29), feminino (f39), estudo (f67), reflecting the pervasive use of masculine generics even in female-focused topics. - HDC indicated six stable classes; notably, no class explicitly referenced gender, sex, men, or women. The second most representative class (Class 6) consisted exclusively of methodological/procedural terms, evidencing a strong focus on methods over epistemological or intersectional issues. - The most representative class (Class 4) emphasized professional roles and workplace conflicts due to diversity, implicitly pointing to gender differences without explicit naming. Class 4 linked to Classes 2 and 3; Class 3 encompassed político, humano, contribuição, social, prático, indicating tensions between political/human considerations and practical business priorities. Cross-cutting insights: - Across both corpora, masculine-centric language persists, particularly in Portuguese, where masculine generics (e.g., empreendedor) reify a male-centered social representation. - Even within literature on female entrepreneurship, explicit feminine terms and direct discussion of gender are often minimized or absent in structural classifications, despite appearing in frequency-based visualizations.

Findings show that scientific discourse on Brazilian female entrepreneurship frequently centers masculine terms and frames, especially in Portuguese, where masculine generics dominate even when studying predominantly female realities. In English abstracts, while “woman” and “female” appear, their associations differ: women are linked to gender, future, and innovation, whereas “female” is framed within economic/entrepreneurial-national contexts. Portuguese analyses reveal that despite the presence of mulher in word frequencies, explicit gendered discourse is largely absent in stable classes, and the masculine noun empreendedor anchors the narrative. This discursive pattern contributes to the sociocultural construction and perpetuation of gender inequalities by naturalizing masculine neutrality and marginalizing women’s specific experiences and voices. The results underscore the need to center women’s perspectives, develop a feminine vocabulary where language permits, and critically address how linguistic choices influence policy, research priorities, and the lived realities of women entrepreneurs. The study highlights that expectations for women to adopt masculinized behaviors to gain legitimacy in entrepreneurship may constitute an additional barrier, reinforcing heteronormative and patriarchal norms.

The study contributes a critical, comparative lexicometric analysis of English and Portuguese scientific abstracts on female entrepreneurship in Brazil, evidencing how masculine-centered language and the underuse of explicitly feminine terms shape sociocultural constructions of gender in the entrepreneurial domain. It underscores the importance of listening to women’s voices and creating a feminine vocabulary—especially in neo-Latin languages—to more accurately represent and support women’s entrepreneurial experiences. Future research should expand to other regional contexts (Latin American, North American, European, African, Asian) and deepen intersectional, epistemological analyses, while engaging directly with women entrepreneurs—particularly from underrepresented and socioeconomically disadvantaged groups—to ensure socially relevant, impactful knowledge.

• Scope limited to abstracts rather than full texts, potentially constraining depth and nuance of thematic and gendered discourse analysis. - Analyses conducted separately by language (English and Portuguese), which may limit cross-language semantic integration. - No specific exclusion criteria due to the small number of papers; the sample size (88 abstracts) and uneven language distribution (51 Portuguese, 37 English) may affect generalizability. - The study focuses on lexical/lexicometric patterns (HDC, word clouds), not broader qualitative interpretations of sociocultural and political contexts; the authors note they did not seek to address these aspects fully. - The call for constructing a feminine vocabulary is acknowledged as not deriving strictly from the statistical results alone, indicating a conceptual extension beyond measured outputs.