Clarifying Concepts and Definitions: A Shared Language for Understanding FLIARA

What is the FLIARA Glossary of Terms

It is a list of terms and definitions used throughout the FLIARA Project. This document is a reference to consult while using and understanding the resources from FLIARA. 

Why use the FLIARA Glossary of Terms:

• It helps clarify and contextualise key terms and definitions used throughout the FLIARA project. This ensures consistency and shared understanding among readers and users of the project resources and findings. Its value also lies in helping users navigate complex or specialised language, reducing ambiguity and enhancing comprehension.
• It provides a baseline knowledge of key terms currently in use in the context of women led innovation within academia and policy. 

Key terms from the FLIARA Glossary: 

Women Entrepreneurship: Regarding the FLIARA project, entrepreneurship is the term used to describe the act of a woman beginning, expanding, and managing a business or initiative. It requires that women take the initiative, generate fresh ideas, and assume the risks associated with starting and running their own enterprises. In the EU, women can take part in a wide range of activities that are classified as entrepreneurship, such as founding new businesses, managing those that already exist, or working for themselves.

Gender Equality: Equal rights, opportunities, and treatment for all people, regardless of gender, is referred to as gender equality. It entails ensuring that everyone, regardless of gender, has equal access to resources, opportunities, and decision-making authority in all spheres of life, including politics, employment, education, and social engagement.

Gender and Social constructs: FLIARA understands gender to refer to socio-cultural processes that shape identities, behaviours, values, norms, knowledge’s etc. In this way, FLIARA examines how society ‘does gender’ (practices, values, norms, roles) and how ‘gender is done’ by others (policy makers, bankers, rules, and regulations). Positioning gender as a social construct allows FLIARA to investigate social relations, context, power dynamics and women’s own agency within the framework of rural innovative ecosystems.

Innovation: In FLIARA project is  women-led innovation, which constitutes a distinct type of innovation that may be technological, political, social and/or link to markets. The distinctive feature of women-led innovations links to gender and to the common disadvantages shaping the lives of rural women innovators and other rural women. 

We consider that women-led innovations: 

1) Can advance gender equality, even when they do not address equality explicitly, 

2) Offer a plausible pathway for social change that is more ethical than a pathway discriminating women led innovations, 3) Are political by definition, if not through their political agenda, then through the performativity embedded in  women-led innovations, 

4) May be individual or collective, but also innovations led by individual women are linked to collective agency by women, 

5) Should normatively be promoted by policy support to advance more ethical and more equal social change.