Scaling the great wall: how women entrepreneurs in China overcome cultural barriers through digital affordances
通过对北京和上海18位女性创业者的访谈，研究识别出四种数字可供性（虚拟网络、在线学习、机会创造和规模化），帮助她们克服父权文化中的性别障碍，并挑战传统结构。
Women in patriarchal societies face cultural barriers hindering them in pursuing entrepreneurship. For example, women are hindered by gender roles, male dominated networks and expectations that they take of the family. Recently, scholars have argued that digital technologies may provide women with avenues to bypass these barriers. Yet, there is little knowledge about how female entrepreneurs engage with digital tools, and how this may help them bypass gendered, cultural barriers. Using 18 interviews with female entrepreneurs in Beijing and Shanghai, we identify four affordances (virtual networking, online learning, opportunity creation and scaling-up) that women use to overcome the cultural barriers to entrepreneurship. We find that through engaging these affordances, the women feel empowered and able to challenge traditional structures. Our paper contributes to recent work in digital and women entrepreneurship as we unpack how women actively create affordances, such as female friendly communities, and how they skilfully use new digital technologies to try to disrupt traditional industries.