Telfer School of Management

• Globally, women are less likely to benefit from entrepreneurship education and training, particularly in programs supporting high-growth enterprises.
• When entrepreneurship programs do consider inclusion, most focus on gender without considering age, ethnicity, race or other identity factors.
• From an economic development perspective, the effectiveness and inclusivity of entrepreneurship programs is important as new businesses account for most net job creation.

Framework to analyze barriers

• Our team developed a framework to support a toolkit for inclusive entrepreneurship education and training called the Gender-Smart Entrepreneurship Education and Training Plus (GEET+) 2.0.
• The toolkit also profiles lessons learned from a systematic review of literature about entrepreneurship education and highlights barriers that marginalized and underrepresented people encounter in entrepreneurship programs.

Biases in education

• Scholars caution that there is a need to critically examine entrepreneurship education and training.
• Research, including studies conducted at Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa, document biases in entrepreneurship education programming.

19 countries and EDI entrepreneurship education

• Our research found an absence of policies and criteria associated with equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in entrepreneurship education and training.
• We asked a 19-country panel of entrepreneurship educators to reflect on
  entrepreneurship programming.

• While some respondents said there were no problems, others identified multiple challenges seen in processes, program content and outcomes.
• We learned that how educators perceive who is or is not under-represented in entrepreneurship programs is context-specific.
• Overall, a key finding was that EDI initiatives have generally not reached entrepreneurship programs.

The framework

• Each component of the framework was tested in settings in the United States and Canada.
• All organizations used the toolkit to assess the status of programs and identify program service or inclusion gaps.

Developing common understanding, goals

• They developed common understandings of equity and inclusion issues within entrepreneurship education and training.
• To learn more, the toolkit including framework and assessment criteria can be downloaded at the University of Ottawa.

Barbara Jayne Orser receives funding from SSHRC. Catherine Elliott does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.