2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Members of historically disenfranchised social identity groups, including women, immigrants, and people of color, face structural barriers to success in entrepreneurship as well as STEM careers (Carter et al., 2015). These barriers include institutional biases, the persistence of ability-based stereotype beliefs, and lack of role models that restrict access to the “human capital” experience needed to succeed (McAdam, 2015). A substantial body of literature has analyzed barriers to participation in entrepreneurship activities broadly, however, research related to disparities in the specific field of academic entrepreneurship is more limited (Poggesi et al., 2020). Further, the idea of intersectionality refers to the combination of minoritized race and gender identities as a unique social experience above and beyond the influence of each identity separately (Essers et al., 2010). Therefore, this approach acknowledges that forms of exclusion based on a variety of social identities are deeply interconnected (Healy et al., 2011). Existing research applying this model to entrepreneurship has called for further study of these patterns (Knight, 2016). In light of the need to apply an intersectional approach to the study of these disparities in the types of capital needed for successful technology commercialization, this paper will describe the pilot-testing of novel open-ended and multiple-choice questions related to minoritized social identities in the context of the Great Lakes I-Corps Hub "Regional" and "Local" I-Corps courses. Our findings support frequent calls in the literature for "mixed-methods" combinations of quantitative and qualitative approaches to the assessment and categorization of social identities, and point to types of such identities that are often excluded from quantitative multiple-choice measures.