Gender matters in entrepreneurship and its influence needs to be explored more thoroughly in social entrepreneurship research. I am working with my coauthors, Paula Englis, Aard Groen, to investigate the influence of gender in starting a social business. We are specifically interested in understanding gender's influence on innovation, and social innovations.

User innovators develop solutions to personal needs and start a business to help others who experience the same needs. They are linked to the social domain owing to their unique innovation and entrepreneurship process, and previous research has found that user-innovators become social entrepreneurs. Based on this, we now explore whether there are gender-related differences for social user-entrepreneurs. Our current research uses a sample of 142 (nascent) social entrepreneurs (64 men and 78 women) who enrolled in a social entrepreneurship training program here in the Netherlands. We explore the interplay of gender and the user-innovator characteristics. Our approach uses a mixed-methods, combining quantitative (survey) and qualitative (19 in-depth interviews) research.

The Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparison Analysis (FsQCA) enabled examining the different configurations in the male and female samples. Our findings show that unique configurations result in starting a social business across and within the gender-samples, supporting our main argument that gender matters in innovation and entrepreneurship. Our insights may help to better understand gender's role in user innovators' innovation and entrepreneurial process. User-innovators are vital in a dynamic and fast-changing environment that is shifting towards a customer-oriented paradigm such as the distributed innovation. We hope future research will consider users' roles in this process and incorporate additional (gendered-)perspectives on users' ability to develop solutions to overcome market and governmental failures. With this paper, we also bridge the gap between the fields of social entrepreneurship and social innovation. We highlight the role end-users can have in solving social problems and pay attention to gender in this process.

Finally, we hope our findings will contribute to better understandings of social entrepreneurs' motivations and will help training programs develop content that addresses the nascent entrepreneurs' needs even more effectively. We would love to see entrepreneurship education programs' masculinization decrease and be restructured to become more inclusive and support everyone.