WOMEN’S TECHNOLOGY ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN TÜRKİYE: CHALLENGES IN ACCESSING FINANCE IN THE CONTEXT OF GENDER

Date

2024-7

Author

Karatay, Cansu

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The purpose of this thesis is to explore how women entrepreneurs experience entrepreneurship in the Turkish high technology sector, and how the gender arrangements affect women’s technology entrepreneurship at the start-up and growth stages in terms of accessing finance. It is argued that women technology entrepreneurs in Türkiye face significant gender-based challenges that prevent them from accessing financial resources, bank loans, investment, and capital to develop their ventures. Patriarchal gender roles and related stereotypes that are perpetuated by the society and the institutions posited in the technology entrepreneurship ecosystem are likely to create additional barriers for women to acquire capital, finance, and business information. These barriers are often multiplied due to intersecting disadvantages and discriminations such as age and ethnicity. The thesis uses a phenomenological research approach focusing on exploring women’s experiences and by understanding the meaning they attribute to those experiences. Interviews with a sample of sixteen Turkish female high technology entrepreneurs were conducted for in-depth investigation of their subjective experiences and the contexts in which these were situated. This thesis is one of the few extant studies demonstrating the major challenges that shape women’s technological entrepreneurship in Türkiye both at start-up and at the growth stage, uncovering their personal gendered experiences rather than engaging with the male-female gender differences in the field.

Subject Keywords

Türkiye, women, finance, technology, entrepreneurship

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/110416

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis