PurposeCareers have come to dominate contemporary discourse on gendered entrepreneurship. This paper aims to explore entrepreneurial careers as recounted by commercially successful female entrepreneurs to examine how they strategize to construct desirable careers in contexts characterized by underdeveloped markets and weak institutions.Design/methodology/approachUsing a qualitative research design, data for our inquiry come from publicly available life history accounts of 20 female entrepreneurs appearing on an enterprise focus television show in Nigeria. The authors supplemented the television interview data with archival data in the form of publicly available digital footprints of the entrepreneurs collected from their company websites, magazines, online newspapers featuring these entrepreneurs and their social media pages such as LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Facebook and Instagram.FindingsThe careers of female entrepreneurs operating in context of underdeveloped institution and markets, the authors found, are characterized by four heterogeneous ingrained dispositions and actions reflecting how they got in and got on with their entrepreneurial careers: (1) “Observing and playing business,” (2) traipsing the “path less traveled,” (3) a hook to the “Pierian spring” of entrepreneurship and (4) “Grace under pressure” in decision-making.Originality/valueThe authors contribute to the entrepreneurship literature by providing insight into the lived experiences, agency and careers of commercially successful female entrepreneurs as played out in the form of a contextual practice of “wayfinding” to starting up and managing their own business ventures.

中文翻译：

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在不发达的市场和薄弱的机构背景下商业成功的女性企业家的职业生涯

目的职业已经开始主导当代关于性别创业的讨论。本文旨在探索商业上成功的女性企业家所讲述的创业生涯，以检验她们如何在市场不发达和制度薄弱的背景下制定战略以构建理想的职业生涯。设计/方法/方法使用定性研究设计，我们调查的数据来自公开在尼日利亚的一个企业焦点电视节目中出现的 20 位女企业家的生活史记录。作者以从公司网站、杂志、以这些企业家为特色的在线报纸及其社交媒体页面（如 LinkedIn）收集的企业家的公开数字足迹的形式，用档案数据补充了电视采访数据，