This special issue contributes to addressing the gap between family business, gender and entrepreneurship by presenting five articles that offer alternative theoretical approaches to researching gender in family businesses. A common thread among our selected articles supports the exploration of further gendered critique in two future research directions. First, exploring how leadership is understood through a gender lens in family businesses. This can be approached through a radical subjectivism perspective considering shared and individual leadership in the context of business families' propensity to innovate (Farrington, Venter & Bischoff, 2012; Litz & Kleyson, 2001). Second, moving beyond conventional assumptions of 'the family unit' to include studies that recognise single parent families, same sex couples, step families and extended families will provide much scope to employ gender as an analytical tool to advance more robust theoretical debates. Both directions offer ample research opportunities to explore gendered processes in the family business, which remain imperative (Al-Dajani & Marlow, 2010), especially given the potential threats to women's roles within the family business.