Please describe an entrepreneur!
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Thank you.
Guess what?

The only thing that interested me was if you start with 'he' or 'she' or use it within your sentence. In March 2004 I asked randomly 42 people in Lincoln the same question. Among them students of different backgrounds and people in High Street. I asked them, like I asked you for AN entrepreneur, all of them described HIM. No one kept using 'she', 'the' or the indefinite article. The narrative of the entrepreneur seems to be a gendered one. Well, let me tell you a story about a female entrepreneur (a she-entrepreneur? an entrepreneuress?).

Beathe Uhse was born in former East Prussia (now Poland) in 1919. Unusual for a woman at that time she attends flying school, becomes a pilot and even flies a military aircraft during WWII. After the war, by the end of the 1940s she starts a new life as an entrepreneur and launches a magazine focused on two taboo topics at that time: sex and contraception. 1951 she expanded into a mail order shop where you could order books about certain topics and also condoms. At this time you could buy condoms only at the chemist. Imagine yourself getting a red face as you receive the product beneath the counter including the nice feeling that your sinful life will end you up in hell. No embarrassing situations in the shop anymore, order from Beathe Uhse, and one of her 14 employees she has two years later, will pack it. 1962 she opens the first sex shop world wide (!) in Flensburg, Germany. When you receive a neutral looking letter or a neutral package today that is sent from Flensburg... well... ok... I think you understand.

Against all odds and obstacles she succeeded with her business, opened a sex museum in Berlin in 1996 and brought her business to the stock market in 1999. She died in 2001. (information taken from Uhse 1989 and homepage)

Her enterprise must be seen in 'a broader perspective than merely business' (Jansson not dated). It also had also impact on the social and everyday life of people. I think she is one of the people responsible for the change in our view of sex. She put an emphasis on important things like contraception, hygiene and STDs.

Maybe Beathe Uhse could only become an entrepreneur because she was not educated to be but to do. Women are often (depending on the cultural background still today) educated to live a domestic life while men are educated to do. Men go out and work while the women stay at home and are housewives (Hassard and Parker 1993: 137).

The circumstances around you always influence if you become entrepreneurial. The culture in that you are born in for example. Germans are often seen as bureaucratic rather than entrepreneurial whilst Americans are regarded as self-made men and women, it is in their culture to be more entrepreneurial and self-reliant as Hofstede shows in its 'Country Individualism Index' (Hofstede 2001: 158). Sometimes people are merely forced to become an entrepreneur if nothing else is left for them to do. High unemployment rates or economic slowdown leave people with no other opportunity than to create their own business. Whatever that business might be, they would have never thought about while being regularly employed. Necessity is the mother of invention.