AU Sociology Social Class Fit and Entrepreneurship Question

week 5 write up

Sarah Thebaud and Amanda Sharkey’s paper (“Unequal hard times“), highlights the role of gender in decisions about entrepreneurial lending through an intriguing puzzle: while gender stereotypes generally assume that women are safer investors because they are–on average–more risk averse then men, after the 2008 financial crisis, women entrepreneurs were less likely to obtain credit because they lacked an appropriate record of prior lending.

In a brief, 500 word essay, I want you to address the general question of how gender stereotypes affect innovation from training and funding to design and production.

In addition to Thebaud and Sharkey’s paper, you may illustrate your argument with examples from the podcast 99% Invisible (Episode: Invisible Women (Links to an external site.)) that deals with Caroline Criado Perez’s work on gendered design. But you must also use one additional example not provided in either Thebaud and Sharkey’s article or the 99% Invisible podcast. This will require doing a little bit of independent research on gender, innovation, and entrepreneurship (think of topics close to your interests, for example, women in science/engineering/ women in leadership positions/ women in government and public administration/ the gender of markerspaces, etc.). When using this example, you must include a complete bibliographic reference for it.

Rubric

Some Rubric

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The case of Elizabeth Holmes’ notorious startup Theranos provides important lessons about the intersection of social class, fit, and entrepreneurship.

After reading the various magazine articles about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, and listening to The Dropout (if you have sufficient time), I want you to consider how Holmes’ background, education, and contacts might have facilitated her initial success and maintained her support despite evidence that the project she was pursuing was clearly a house of cards. Specifically, in a 500-700 word essay,

1. address how Holmes’ status, class, and social capital were central her early entrepreneurial success;
2. reflect on whether and how social class matters for entrepreneurship;
3. connect to Lauren Rivera’s discussion of “fit” and cultural matching in the context of elite professional settings;
4. consider if the capacities to fail and innovate innovation are equally distributed across social classes.