Webinar 1 – january 11, 2023

In this presentation, Professor Haya discussed how to design gender and entrepreneurship research so that it influences related policy and practice in this region. Our research needs to inform policy and practice in meaningful and impactful ways so that entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship, and the entrepreneurship ecosystems within the Arab world can thrive.

Dr. Ghada addressed the growth and resilience of Saudi women-owned digital microbusinesses during adverse social and economic disruptions, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, her study utilized the ‘broaden-and-build theory’ to explore how Saudi women entrepreneurs regulate their emotions during the transformation period in Saudi Arabia. You can learn more about this research through the following open access publication:
Alhothali, G.T., and Al-Dajani, H., (2022) Emotions and Resilience in Saudi Women’s Digital Entrepreneurship during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Sustainability, 14, 8794. (doi.org/10.3390/su14148794)

Professor Haya Al-Dajani

A Professor of Entrepreneurship and Director of the EMBA Signature Learning Experience at the Mohammed Bin Salman College of Business and Entrepreneurship (MBSC) in Saudi Arabia, Haya’s award winning research centers upon women’s entrepreneurship in the Arab world. She is Associate Editor of the International Journal of Entrepreneurship Behaviour and Research and a member of the Editorial Boards of several leading entrepreneurship journals. Haya is co-founder and co-chair of the Gender and Enterprise Network and its affiliate in the Arab world, the Middle East and North Africa Gender and Enterprise Network (MENAGEN).

Dr Ghada Talat Alhothali

Dr. Ghada Talat Alhothali is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia. She was a consultant at the Saudi Center for Preparing and Empowering Entrepreneurs (SCPEE) and a member of the committee of Prince Khalid Al Faisal’s Scientific Chair for role model research. She has multiple publications about mass Islamic events. She has also published multidisciplinary research concerning public health and climate change. Her primary areas of interest are service marketing and technology, as well as mass event management. She is also interested in women’s empowerment and digital entrepreneurship.

Webinar 2 – february 1, 2023

Presented by
Professor Julia Rouse

Key challenges for many women entrepreneurs are the tasks of combining business start-up and trading with childcare and/or pregnancy. The nature of these challenges varies according the woman’s social context as this shapes her access to childcare services and maternity rights, childcare support within her family and her power to pay for childcare services or to deploy resources to cope with a maternity leave period. A woman’s process of reconciling family and work also depends on her cultural context and, in particular, cultural norms about pregnancy, childhood and mothering. In order to understand the barrier that childcare and maternity create for female entrepreneurs, and to explain the coping strategies women adopt, we need to develop context-sensitive explanations. In this webinar, Prof Julia Rouse considered a range of theoretical lenses that can be used to explore how women entrepreneurs cope with childcare and pregnancy in the Middle East and North Africa and invite discussion about the different contexts occupied by particular women. The aim of the webinar was to enable researchers to use theory to develop powerful research questions and theoretical frameworks that will guide insightful research into women reconciling entrepreneurship with childcare and pregnancy. The webinar also encouraged researchers to use research to think about ‘what might work’ to support women better or, indeed, to use research methodologies that explore ‘what works, for whom and when’?

Professor Julia Rouse works in the Sylvia Pankhurst Gender and Diversity Research Centre at Manchester Metropolitan University. She co-founded ISBE’s Gender and Enterprise Network (ISBE GEN). Julia is passionately committed to advancing the quality of research on women’s entrepreneurship and to putting that knowledge to work to create more enabling conditions for women entrepreneurs. As such, she is the Co-Head of the Women’s Enterprise Policy Group. Julia has researched childcare and maternity in entrepreneurship and in small firms in the UK and contributed to an international review of evidence on maternity management in small firms. She is also Co-Director of a small business.

Webinar 3 – April 12, 2023

Digitalization is opening up new innovation opportunities for women entrepreneurs (McAdam et al., 2020; Kelly and McAdam, 2022) however, research on digital entrepreneurship tends to treat digital entrepreneurs as homogenous (Wang & Keane, 2020), and therefore, overlooks those who differ from normative assumptions, such as women, and the social and cultural contexts in which their experiences as entrepreneurs are embedded (Pergelova et al., 2019). An emerging body of literatures aims to address this omission by drawing explicitly on a social constructionist feminist lens (Braches & Elliott, 2017; Leavy & Harris, 2018; Stead, 2017) to analyze the experiences and perceptions of women digital entrepreneurs (Dy et al. 2017; McAdam et al., 2020; Meurer et al., 2021). In so doing, they question the ‘democratization’ of entrepreneurship (Nambisan 2017, p. 1032) and whether this refers to neoliberal, postfeminist discourses that, paradoxically, both empower and marginalize women, or to the issue of the emulation of traditional gender norms and social ideals. By exploring these issues, this workshop aims is to inspire and ignite important theoretical, empirical and practical questions relating to women’s digital entrepreneurship that can be explored internationally.

Professor Maura McAdam is renowned internationally for her pioneering work in the area of women’s entrepreneurship, as a result of her exploration of the influence of gender and diversity upon entrepreneurial behaviour spanning more than 20 years. She has extensive experience of building and leading international research teams and of enabling and participating successfully in both regional and international entrepreneurial ecosystems, because of well-established research networks in the UK, Ireland, EU, New Zealand, US and the Middle East. Professor McAdam has made serious and lasting theoretical and methodological contributions to the area of women’s entrepreneurship, with her research published in FT Top 50 journals and other top-rated US and UK journals across a range of theoretical disciplines. Additionally, she has authored the books Female Entrepreneurship (2013) and Women’s Entrepreneurship (2022). For the last two years, Professor McAdam has been ranked amongst the top 2% of scientists in the world for research impact for her research on women’s entrepreneurship. She is an invited Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a selected member of the Royal Irish Academy Social Sciences Committee. In 2019, she received an Irish Women’s Award and in 2022 she was a Women Mean Business finalist in the Empowering Women Category. Known by many aspiring women entrepreneurs, Professor McAdam is an engaged thought leader and regular media commentator on women’s entrepreneurship.

Webinar 4 – October 11, 2023

Presented by
Dr Lorna Treanor & Professor Susan Marlow & Professor Haya Al-Dajani

The MPP launch webinar, facilitated by Professor Haya Al-Dajani, Professor Susan Marlow, and Dr. Lorna Treanor, critically evaluated how to prepare, argue, structure, and revise a journal article submission to maximize the likelihood of review, revision, and acceptance in a recognized journal. The facilitators drew on their editorial expertise and experience in publishing in top-rated journals. A range of issues were covered, including which journal to target, how to structure arguments, demonstrating contribution, writing analytically, presenting empirical material, key editing aspects, and responding to reviewers. Participants were encouraged to bring their questions about their publication queries and experiences. The session was recorded and made available to all registered participants. In adopting this approach, we hoped to make this an interactive, informal session that directly responds to the research and scholarship priorities.

Webinar 5 – November 13, 2023

Presented by
Dr Chris Carter

Presented by
Professor Susan Marlow

During this interactive session, there were two presentations aimed at supporting the knowledge, understanding, and skills development of academic network building, specifically within the entrepreneurship community.

• The first presentation, delivered by Dr. Chris Carter, Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Haydn Green Institute and Deputy ISBE President at Nottingham University Business School, provided hints, tips, and considerations for building an academic brand.
• The second presentation was given by Professor Susan Marlow, Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Haydn Green Institute, Nottingham University Business School, and focused on networking online, offline, and at conferences.

Throughout the session, attendees had the opportunity to share their own networking experiences, practice networking, and identify new practices to develop their academic brand and expand their network.

Webinar 6 – December 13, 2023

Presented by
Dr Farah Arkadan

Dr. Farah Arkadan, a participant of the MENAGEN MPP 2022 mentored by Professor Katerina Nicolopoulo from the University of Strathclyde, shared insights gained while reshaping and revising a paper for journal submission. She shared her process of navigating the journal submission pathway through her mentoring meeting discussions, the range of topics discussed and related to navigating decisions around preparing for submission to a journal, including publication strategy, choosing between different topics, scoping, and positioning topics for target journals. Additionally, Dr. Farah discussed career development aspects, including early career publication strategies and balancing teaching and research responsibilities.

Presenter: Dr. Farah Arkadan

Dr. Farah Arkadan, an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the American University in Dubai, also serves as the Chair of the Department of Management and Marketing and Accreditation Lead for AUD’s School of Business. With a Ph.D. from Cranfield School of Management, UK, her research focused on customer experience, organizational studies, and marketing management. Dr. Arkadan’s work involved in-depth case studies with organizations in retail, service, and business-to-consumer sectors. She had previous experience with Burberry headquarters in London, contributing to strategic customer initiatives for delivering seamless luxury experiences.

MENAGEN MPP Mentor: Professor Katerina Nicolopoulou

Professor of Entrepreneurship and Social Innovation at Strathclyde Business School embraces a ‘learning by inquiry’, emergent, synergistic and collaborative ethos, mirrored in her approach to leadership, research, teaching and supervision. Amongst her extensive leadership roles in nurturing entrepreneurship and social innovation research, Katerina founded and leads Strathclyde’s Research Group on Global Socially Progressive Entrepreneurship and Innovation. She has also held the role of Director of Research at the Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship as well as Global DBA Director. She has a comprehensive scholarship profile which includes over 100 research outputs, and is also a Trademark Inventor of the UK registered trademark ‘Sword and Shield’ for the Toolkit and platform focused on Entrepreneurial Leadership and Resilience for Women of the Global South which was developed via research-based invention disclosures supported by the stage-gating process of the University of Strathclyde Inspire program. Her upcoming books in 2024-2025 promised insightful perspectives on entrepreneurial leadership and African entrepreneurship.