Brownbag Luncheon on Entrepreneurship: Chances and Challenges for Female Entrepreneurs in the New Digital Workforce

For the past 30 years, women in the United States have earned more bachelor and master degrees than men (Source: Department for Professional Employees), and women-owned businesses are growing at a 1.5x faster rate than all other firms. Women-owned businesses are generating $1.3 trillion in revenues annually, and the value continues to rise; revenues were up 59% in the U.S. between 1997 and 2013 (Source: NAWBO). On top of that, women entrepreneurs in the U.S. are much more engaged in the innovation sector, with 36% of female business owners delivering innovative products and services, compared to 17% of men (Source: Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Women’s Report). In spite of these developments start-ups are still mostly founded by men.

Prof. Fisher will discuss why this is so, what skills are necessary to overcome existing obstacles, what role factors such as work-life balance play, what experiences female entrepreneurs have made in the start-up culture in the United States and what their future might be like in the new digital workforce.

The luncheon is part of an ongoing German-American discussion about how to build a start-up community in the region and how to support Americans and their businesses and business ideas

is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. She earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in cultural anthropology at Columbia University, and her B.A. at Barnard College. She has received grants and fellowships, including awards from the Alfred Sloan Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study at Lancaster University, and the Centre for Organizational Research at Stockholm University.

Fisher’s research is situated in the interdisciplinary fields of American Studies, Urban Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies as well as Anthropology and Sociology. Her work links insights from critical social theory with ethnographic research. Her book, Wall Street Women (Duke University Press, 2012), ethnographically examines how the first cohort of women in finance enacted market feminisms - incorporating tenets of liberal feminism such as equal rights into Wall Street institutions. Fisher has also published book chapters and in journals including City and Society, Collaborative Anthropologies, Critical Perspectives on International Business and Globalizations. She is also the co-editor of Frontiers of Capitalism: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy (Duke Press, 2006). She is writing a book manuscript tentatively entitled White Corporate Feminism and Its Discontents.

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