Universities increasingly encourage students to gain skills and develop entrepreneurial abilities to support both their career development and economic growth generally through the creation of new businesses and self-employment on graduation. However, a long line of male thinkers have shaped entrepreneurship education approaches throughout the world and this has traditionally positioned entrepreneurship as a masculine-framed concept. In an increasingly female university sector, this historical focus on the male experience has implications for curriculum development and suggests a need for more critical engagement with this complex social, political and economic phenomenon.

Although there is no universally agreed definition of entrepreneurship, there is an increasing focus on psychological and personality based ideas which have developed out of the historical literature. There is also a focus on the entrepreneur as the driver for economic growth and the support of entrepreneurship as a political imperative for world-wide economic development. This, in turn, has led to an urgency around entrepreneurship education and the support and encouragement of entrepreneurship amongst university graduates. Given Sawyer's comments and the current political imperative of entrepreneurialism, entrepreneurship could be viewed as a social construction; developed, co-opted and re-imagined to suit the perceived needs of our contemporary cultural contexts. Writers, such as Helene Ahl (2004), go further, suggesting that there is also an inherent masculine bias in received notions of the entrepreneur and this is arguably due to the fact that it has traditionally been researched exclusively by men using male subjects; with ideas suggested by Richard Cantillon in the 1700s being refined and developed in the 1800s and 1900s by authors, such as J-B Say, Alfred Marshall and Joseph Schumpeter, whose highly influential book, The Theory of Economic Development, was published in 1911. These masculine-framed ideas continue to inform approaches to entrepreneurship education throughout the world which is problematic, given an increasingly female university cohort and with countries such as those in North America and the UK now having more female than male undergraduates.

Without reference to the historical context, we cannot acknowledge and explore issues which highlight and question the "pattern of using male experience to define the human experience". Carter and Marlow (2003) agree, suggesting that "historically, women have been left off the small business research agenda or made invisible by research practices or in other ways written out of the analysis of self-employment". Other people have historically set an entrepreneurship research agenda that has traditionally excluded women's experiences and this has led to suggestions that we should "question how business schools train nascent entrepreneurs for a male, profit-orientated, growth orientated economic entity".

Although a seemingly `modern' concept, the entrepreneur and theorizing around entrepreneurial activities, attitudes and abilities are rooted in ideas developed in the 18^th century by Richard Cantillonthe first to use the term entrepreneurand developed by the French economist J-B Say. The privileging of male experience is suggested by the long line of male economists and philosophers who have since engaged with their ideas to inform modern concepts of entrepreneurship including Adam Smith, Alfred Marshall, John Stuart Mill, and Joseph Schumpeter. Contemporary mainstream researchers and academics continue to draw on these historically masculine-framed ideas of entrepreneurship, refining and developing our present day understandings of the entrepreneur and approaches to entrepreneurship education.

MBA Review Magazine, Career Development, Economic Growth, Entrepreneurship Education, Economic Entity, Entrepreneurship Theories, Entrepreneurial Aspirations, Social Constructions, Business Schools, Economic Development, Personality Traits.