ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the legitimacy perceived by women entrepreneurs in relation to themselves and in their interactions with their stakeholders. By focusing on sex and sex categorisation as sources of differentiated treatments, the chapter observes how interactions may produce specific outcomes for women, and how entrepreneurial processes and norms contribute to "the creation and recreation of the gendered substructures" of entrepreneurship. Situated in the heart of political thought for centuries, legitimacy has been the subject of a plethora of social science works. Identity legitimacy can be defined as the perception, evaluation, and subjectively significant ownership that an individual has of his or her worth in relation to his or her occupation and construed as a condition of his or her self-esteem. The theory of self-categorization focuses on the processes of self-perception and others' perception according to the mechanisms of self-categorization in connection with abstract social categories.
