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Nigeria presents something of an entrepreneurial paradox. Women in entrepreneurship dominate the economy, yet patriarchal structures dominate society. This article investigates how patriarchal factors impact entrepreneurial processes, in turn, creating unequal expectations of entrepreneurial opportunity.

The study adopts an intersectionality lens to explore how patriarchy is manifest for entrepreneurs. The reflective narratives of 30 entrepreneurs are analysed, provided through semi-structured interviews. An inductive qualitative approach accesses the gendered discourse of entrepreneurship as constructed by entrepreneurs. Within this discourse, the factors of patriarchy are exposed.

Findings reveal a multi-faceted patriarchy, with the informing factors of entrepreneurial gender roles, class and religion. The study explains how the interaction of these factors reinforce patriarchal ideals and create a variety of gendered images of what is acceptable entrepreneurial activity in Nigeria, and for whom.

This study contributes to growing insight on entrepreneurship in Africa and challenges linear arguments of entrepreneurship-as-emancipation for women. In complex and multidimensional contexts, entrepreneurs must navigate the intersection of factors sensitively, ensuring acceptance and fulfilment of societal expectations. The power of intersectionality as a theory of contextualisation is discussed.

Policies intended to encourage gender equity in the film industry are ramifying and take many forms. This paper uses social network analysis to assess the effectiveness of one popular equity policy, shadowing, a form of mentoring. In shadowing programs, women and gender minorities (WGM) are connected to more experienced members of the industry through attachment to their productions.

We constructed real collaboration networks based on film releases from 2005 to 2020 in three countries and simulated the effects that hypothetical shadowing interventions would have on the distribution of social capital in these networks. We implement different versions of the intervention, including different eligibility criteria for shadows and shadowees as well as isolating the additive effects on participants’ project portfolios.

We find that shadowing is effective in enabling WGM to access the strongest network positions, which are currently disproportionately occupied by men. However, we show that the primary reason that shadowing is effective in doing this is because it provides a second project affiliation to WGM in an industry where it is difficult to get past one’s first project.

Our study contributes to the literature on how mentoring policies affect people’s professional networks as well as scholarship on mentoring as a gender equity policy. We contribute novel evidence to debates about the efficacy of shadowing programs for WGM in the film industry. We suggest that shadowing can be effective as a tool for not only helping individual WGM advance their careers but also for structurally reconfiguring the distribution of power in project-based collaboration networks.