Developing and validating a dictionary of gendered language in entrepreneurship

Gendered language shapes entrepreneurial opportunities by influencing perceptions, evaluations, and access to resources. Women entrepreneurs face systemic disadvantages in fundraising and startup-growth opportunities, and linguistic bias might be one contributing mechanism. Yet entrepreneurship-specific dictionaries for studying such patterns remain limited. In this study, we develop and validate a gender-calibrated dictionary for examining gendered language in entrepreneurship. Drawing on startup accelerators’ calls for applications across five global regions (North America, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe), and survey data from entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs, we created and validated an entrepreneurship-specific dictionary of stereotypically feminine and masculine-coded words. We benchmark our dictionary against established general-purpose gendered language dictionaries, demonstrating its domain specificity. We illustrate its application by identifying five methodological implications for entrepreneurship research, including: 1) enabling studies grounded in entrepreneurship-specific language rather than tools borrowed from adjacent fields; 2) revealing cross-regional variation in word interpretation; 3) uncovering mismatches between inclusive language and organizational practice; 4) offering vignette-based tools for experiments related to gender; and 5) enabling the integration of semantic meaning and word structure. Together, the dictionary and these illustrative applications offer scholars a context-specific tool for studying gendered language in entrepreneurship and provide practitioners with guidance for evaluating inclusive communication materials. Read the Signals, Change the System: Diagnosing Gender-Coded Language in Entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship ecosystems often present themselves as meritocratic spaces where the best ideas win. Yet the language used to describe opportunities, whether in accelerator calls, startup competitions, or funding programs, can implicitly signal who is expected to participate. Words emphasizing ambition or competence, often interpreted as of masculine nature, can appear more or less significantly than words such as collaboration or support, often interpreted as of feminine nature. Word choice shapes how opportunities are framed and how entrepreneurs, as the audience of such communication, interpret whether they belong in entrepreneurship ecosystems. If accelerators, incubators and similar organizations are truly serious about broadening participation, the first step is to identify the gender signals embedded in opportunity descriptions. This paper contributes to this aim by introducing a validated dictionary designed to categorize gender-coded language in startup accelerator contexts. Developed from a large corpus of accelerator calls across multiple world regions, the dictionary enables systematic analysis of gendered language in entrepreneurship discourse. It provides researchers with a transparent way to examine patterns in entrepreneurial opportunities, while offering accelerator managers and ecosystem builders a practical tool to audit and reflect on the language used in their own programs. Reading these signals is not the end goal; it is a starting point for designing genuinely inclusive entrepreneurial opportunities.