Abstracts Womens Studies

Queering Entrepreneurship: An ethnographic study of a women-led tech startup in Berlin

by Miguel Wilson

With the rise of more women-led firms in the tech industry, the question of how these organizations either differentiate or align themselves with their male-dominanted competitors is of growing interest. I examine whether a women-led tech startup in Berlin, Germany, with a socially-driven product, would embody the same problematic work culture (e.g., "work hard, play hard," sexual harassment, overwork) that has been reported in previous research on tech firms (Pöllänen 2021). Data collection took place in June-July of 2022 and included ethnographic participant observation, triangulated by semi-structured interviews and photo-elicited interviews with workers from More Than A Jewel (MTAJ), a women-led tech startup in Berlin. Using a constructivist grounded theory approach (Charmaz 2017), through the lens of queer theory, I abductively test Acker’s (1990) theory of gendered organizations and explore the presence of MTAJ’s non-normative gendering processes. I argue that these processes were fundamentally queered due to MTAJ’s organizational logic that workers should exercise their duty by engaging in communal work in order to be empowered. With growing concerns surrounding employee engagement and organizational commitment (Sull, Sull, & Zweig 2022), this study provides an example of how communally-empowered work can better serve employees and organizations at large. Future research should continue to explore what it means to behave communally at work, and how historically excluded groups, particularly queer individuals, can be made to feel more included in today’s workplaces.