Pauline Reinecke, Leuphana University Lüneburg

Ignas Bruder, Technische Universität Dresden

Tobias Hahn, Esade Business School

Olga Kokshagina, University of Sydney

Stephanie Schrage, Kiel University

Janina Sundermeier, Freie Universität Berlin

Gender paradoxes emerge from tensions embedded in organizations, where competing expectations generate not only managerial challenges but also fundamental ethical questions about inclusion, equality, and responsibility. While prior research has examined barriers such as the glass ceiling and pay inequality, less attention has been paid to how gender paradoxes subtly yet systematically shape organizational experiences and allocate moral responsibilities among actors.

Gender is approached as an institutionalized system of social practices for constituting people as two significantly different categories, men and women, and organizing social relations of inequality on the basis of that difference. At the same time, the special issue recognizes the lived realities of intersex, non-binary, genderfluid, and other gender-diverse individuals who navigate structures grounded in binary norms.

Paradoxes, defined as contradictory yet interrelated elements that exist simultaneously and persist over time, are central to many tensions related to gender in organizations. These include the double bind women leaders face in balancing agentic and communal expectations, the difficulties gender-diverse individuals encounter when resisting dominant norms of professionalism, and the strain between care responsibilities and workplace demands for emotional detachment.

Gender paradoxes raise critical ethical questions: Whose interests are prioritized? Who bears moral and emotional burdens? What responsibilities do organizations, and specifically those organizational members unaffected by exclusion, hold in addressing these tensions? And when do such tensions call for institutional reform rather than individual adaptation? This Special Issue seeks to foreground the ethical dimensions of gender paradoxes in organizations.

The special issue welcomes original contributions that examine gender paradoxes not only analytically but also through ethically grounded normative arguments about how individuals and organizations can and should respond. Submissions should critically engage with ethical questions posed by gender paradoxes such as how moral responsibility is distributed, what burden visibility imposes, and how organizational actions with moral intent may reproduce inequality.

Submissions may tap into a range of theoretical traditions, including paradox, identity, institutional, practice, and discourse theory – as well as normative frameworks such as feminist ethics, ethics of care, virtue ethics, deontological approaches to ethics, and critical management studies. The special issue explicitly welcomes theoretically and methodologically diverse submissions that offer distinct insights into the empirical phenomenon of gender paradoxes, examining how related tensions are generated, navigated, and contested in organizational life.

Potential topics

• Systemic constraints: How ethical commitments to inclusion and equality clash with organizational systems optimized for efficiency – such as standardized evaluations, established management practices, or masculinized leadership norms
• Competing values and moral ambiguity: How ideals such as fairness, meritocracy, and equity create ethical tensions and "tragic choices", where no option is without compromise
• Limits of both/and thinking: How both/and strategies for navigating gender paradoxes can foster more inclusive responses, but may also obscure structural inequalities and shift responsibility to individuals
• Symbolic inclusion and tokenism: How efforts such as diversity targets or flexible work arrangements may produce ethically problematic outcomes, including constrained agency, limited advancement, and superficial change
• Stigma, visibility, and marginalization: How gender-diverse professionals experience and resist stigmatization within organizations, raising ethical questions about who bears the burden of representation

Timeline

• August 31, 2026: Submission deadline

Shuang Lu Frost, Aarhus University

Magdalena Markowska, King's College London

Kai Roland Green, Aarhus University

Kimberly Eddleston, Northeastern University

Alisa Jno-Charles, Babson College

Haibo Zhou, University of Nottingham Ningbo China

Ulla Hytti, University of Turku

According to the 2021 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor report, nearly half of early-stage entrepreneurs globally are raising children. These parent-entrepreneurs navigate a unique landscape where the demands of child-rearing directly intersect with the pressures of business creation and survival at the individual, family, business, and societal levels. The quest for work-family balance draws many entrepreneurs. Yet entrepreneurship often intensifies the work-family conflict it was meant to resolve, affecting both business performance and personal well-being. Motherhood and fatherhood thus play a critical yet underexplored role in shaping entrepreneurial motivations, practices, and outcomes. Understanding these dynamics is vital for entrepreneurial practice: it can inform the design of more effective support systems and guide policymakers in creating inclusive ecosystems that recognise the dual roles many founders play.

Addressing these dynamics requires looking beyond the individual entrepreneur to the broader social fabric in which parenthood and entrepreneurship are simultaneously enacted. Entrepreneurship is increasingly recognised as a socially embedded activity, shaped not only by market forces but also by identities, family roles, and regional contexts. Despite the prevalence of parenthood among entrepreneurs, scholarly exploration of its various forms and their impact on entrepreneurial life remains limited. While a growing body of research examines the relationship between motherhood and entrepreneurship, topics such as fatherhood, household dynamics, single parenthood, LGBTQ+ parenting, and the intersection of parenthood with diverse regional contexts remain largely uncharted.

This special issue welcomes both explanatory and causal research (examining drivers, outcomes, and resource endowments) and interpretive and social constructivist research (exploring narratives, identities, and discourses) on the relationship between parenthood and entrepreneurship. We believe these traditions jointly advance understanding of how parenthood shapes, and is shaped by, entrepreneurial activity, and that neither quantitative nor qualitative approaches alone are sufficient to capture the full complexity of this intersection. Contributions may draw on qualitative, quantitative, mixed-method, or conceptual approaches, and we particularly welcome longitudinal, comparative, and multilevel designs that are sensitive to how parental roles and regional contexts vary across time and place.

Research on motherhood and entrepreneurship has generated important insights into how women negotiate parental and professional identities. Concepts such as the 'mumpreneur' and motherhood as a springboard for entrepreneurial action have enriched our understanding. However, much of this work concentrates on a relatively narrow set of themes: principally work-family balance among entrepreneurial mothers in Western contexts. Equally, as new entrepreneurial forms emerge in digital spaces, such as 'tradwives' and female influencers, theories of entrepreneurial motherhood must be reaffirmed or redeveloped. We welcome studies that break new theoretical, contextual, or methodological ground in this area, moving beyond established findings to examine, for instance, how motherhood intersects with gender, race, class, disability, or migration status in shaping entrepreneurial trajectories.

Fathers constitute half of all parents yet remain a surprisingly rare subject of investigation within entrepreneurship studies. While entrepreneurial fathers are known to enact various forms of 'entrepreneurial masculinity' just as mothers also do in relation to hegemonic masculinity typical for the Western social representation of entrepreneurs, the field has given little attention to how emerging models of 'involved fatherhood' reshape men's personal and professional priorities. The nascent concept of the 'dadpreneur' hints at new configurations of paternal and entrepreneurial identity, while cultural representations in television and popular film offer rich material for examining entrepreneurial father figures and evolving masculinities. We invite contributions that explore how fatherhood shapes entrepreneurial masculinity, how non-normative masculinities find expression in entrepreneurial settings, and how care-oriented models of masculinity influence venture decisions.

Several family forms have received little or no attention from entrepreneurship scholars. Single-parent entrepreneurs face distinct resource constraints and identity negotiations. Lesbian, gay, and queer parents navigating entrepreneurship encounter unique relational dynamics, while non-traditional household arrangements such as polyamorous parenting raise novel questions about how familial configurations interact with venture creation. Future studies could also consider family diversity, including entrepreneuring mothers/fathers in families with children with additional needs or other dependents requiring care. This special issue welcomes contributions that illuminate these underexplored configurations and their implications for entrepreneurial identity, motivation, and practice.

The dynamics between parents and between parents and children deserve further study. A partner's self-employment status influences the decision to become self-employed, and household egalitarianism positively affects mothers' entrepreneurial entry. Fathers, too, can be drawn into entrepreneurship by a spouse's business activity, and parental entrepreneurs shape children's career orientations. We invite research that examines the relational and negotiated nature of entrepreneurial decisions within households.

The impact of parenthood extends to the 'silent stakeholders' of the entrepreneurial journey: the children. While existing literature touches on family business succession, there is a pressing need to examine how entrepreneurial propensity and behaviours are transmitted across generations outside the traditional family firm context. Important questions remain about which specific resources, such as financial capital, self-efficacy, risk profiles, social capital, and family-to-business enrichment, are passed from entrepreneurial parents to their children. Yet entrepreneurial households are not merely channels of resource transmission; they are also sites of socialization and relational dynamics. For instance, interparental interaction patterns and parenting styles can shape children's perceptions of entrepreneurship as a desirable life path and influence children's traits closely linked to entrepreneurial behavior. Therefore, we also invite studies that go beyond transmission to explore children's lived experiences, identity formation, and well-being within entrepreneurial households, and explore how the development of a child in such a household is situated in complex systems where macro-level factors (national culture, welfare policies) filter through meso-level contexts (industry norms) to shape micro-level family dynamics and child outcomes.

Parenthood is a socially and culturally constructed experience shaped significantly by institutional frameworks. The entrepreneurial pathways of parents are heavily influenced by national and regional welfare-state policies, particularly those governing parental leave and affordable childcare. In liberal market economies such as the United States, where state-subsidised childcare is limited, many parents, especially mothers, are pushed into necessity-driven entrepreneurship as a strategy for creating flexibility. In social-democratic welfare states such as those in Scandinavia, comprehensive benefits tied to full-time employment can create high opportunity costs for starting a business, yet generous paid parental leave can simultaneously serve as a crucial incubation period for venture development. In many developing countries, where formal state support may be weak, extended family networks providing childcare become a critical determinant of a parent's ability to pursue entrepreneurial activities. We therefore encourage comparative and context-sensitive research that examines how prevailing policy regimes, cultural norms, and regional ecosystems support or constrain parent-entrepreneurs in different settings.

The special issue welcomes contributions drawing on several theoretical perspectives. Gender and care frameworks illuminate how gendered expectations around caregiving shape access to entrepreneurial resources, legitimacy, and identity. Relevant frameworks include role congruity theory, which illuminates the tension between communal expectations of parenthood and the agentic demands of entrepreneurship, and stereotype threat theory, which helps explain how awareness of gender-based stereotypes can suppress entrepreneurial confidence and performance among both mothers and fathers. Moving beyond classical gender theories, more recent doing gender theorizing and approaches invite scholars to novel understandings of how doing gender and enacting multiple masculinities and femininities might affect both men and women entrepreneurs, as well as their ventures and households. Embeddedness and context perspectives examine how regional ecosystems, welfare regimes, and institutional environments mediate the relationship between parenthood and entrepreneurship. Contributions may draw on the family embeddedness perspective, which positions the household as a critical unit shaping entrepreneurial resource mobilisation, as well as institutional theory to examine how formal and informal rules govern the compatibility of parenting and venture creation across contexts. Stigma theory may also prove insightful in understanding how certain parental identities, including single parenthood, LGBTQ+ parenting, and other non-normative family structures, shape entrepreneurial legitimacy and identity management. Identity and discourse perspectives explore how parent-entrepreneurs construct, negotiate, and communicate their identities. Useful lenses include entrepreneurial identity, social identity theory, sensemaking frameworks, and family systems theory, which together offer tools for examining how entrepreneurs integrate or struggle to integrate parental and entrepreneurial roles into a coherent self-concept.

Potential topics

• How do parent-entrepreneurs negotiate entrepreneurial and parental identities across gender, culture, and sexuality?
• How do emerging models of fatherhood/motherhood shape entrepreneurship?
• What role does founder identity transformation play in the transition to entrepreneurial parenthood?
• How do single parents, LGBTQ+ parents, and individuals in non-normative family forms experience entrepreneurial entry and growth?
• How is role conflict or role enrichment experienced differently by mothers and fathers in entrepreneurial families?
• How do partner dynamics and household egalitarianism shape entrepreneurial decisions?
• What specific resources (cognitive, financial, human, social capital) are transmitted from entrepreneurial parents to children?
• What are the lived experiences and well-being outcomes of children growing up in entrepreneurial households?
• How do macro-level factors (e.g., economic instability, policy frameworks) interact with household dynamics to influence children's outcomes and orientations?
• In what ways do interparental interactions and household role negotiations shape children's perception of entrepreneurship?
• How do entrepreneurial households balance opportunity creation with potential stress or instability for children?
• How do regional policies, parental leave systems, and childcare infrastructure shape entrepreneurial entry, continuation, and exit among parents?
• How do parent-entrepreneurs' experiences differ across welfare regimes (liberal, social-democratic, conservative, developing-country contexts)?
• What role do informal institutions and extended family networks play in enabling or constraining parental entrepreneurship?
• How does the portrayal of parent-entrepreneurs in media, public discourse, and cultural narratives affect entrepreneurial motives and sources of satisfaction?
• How does the self-representation and identity work of parent-entrepreneurs on social media and in entrepreneurial communities contribute to their business success and well-being?
• How do discursive ideals of 'good motherhood' or 'involved fatherhood' constrain or enable entrepreneurial action?
• What are the longitudinal effects of entrepreneurship on family well-being, and vice versa?
• How does parenthood influence innovation, creativity, or business performance?
• How do entrepreneurial career trajectories differ based on family status, parenting roles, and the timing of parenthood relative to venture creation?

Timeline

• June 1, 2026: Abstract deadline
• July 1, 2027: Manuscript deadline