Research fails to distinguish the socio-economic and institutional restrictions embedded within contextualised cultural norms, which consequently reduces the scope of those who can enter the field as a credible entrepreneurial actor (Marlow and Swail, 2014). Moreover, what appears is that the self-employed and women in ‘high status’ professional positions have been seriously ‘neglected’ by society, mass media and the academic community (Baker et al., 1997: 221). Entrepreneurship inquiry emphasises the interpretations of contexts of human experience by using the term embeddedness. Entrepreneurship embeddedness in relation to women’s practices is an under-investigated area in the field of entrepreneurship research. Prior research indicates that gender equality is negatively related to women’s choice of self-employment in male-oriented industries (Klyver et al., 2013). The purpose of this study is to examine how women entrepreneurs are building embeddedness in male-gendered fields1 and how they create embedding in such fields in practice. We suggest that embedding as a practice process might be one way forward. We draw upon Lachmann’s institutional approach and relate it to embeddedness creation and building as a way to challenge prevailing views about the ability of the women chefs to drive change in the institutional (Watson, 2013) and professional field. Lachmann’s approach explicitly highlights how different institutional and structural characteristics are determining the prospects of creating a business by emphasising imagination rather than discovery of entrepreneurial opportunities. His assumption rests on cognitive psychology that privilege creation of novelty by bisociation, that is, the intermingling of unrelated ideas from various sources and knowledge domains (Garud et al., 2007:960). Lachmann’s framework views entrepreneurship through subjective and individual lenses and provides a distinctive feature of the embedding mechanism that enables entrepreneurs to use specifics of the context to become a part of the institutional structure. Accordingly, his wide and generic view emphasises creation of novelties through ‘expectations of an imagined future and exploit opportunities through continuous resource combination and recombination’ (Chiles et al., 2007:467). This, in turn, enables women entrepreneurs to use their own personal resources and challenge the accepted and institutionalised reality of their context.