This study examines how women build transformative agency within entrepreneurial ecosystems through collective action and how these ecosystems are transformed as a result. Adopting a critical realist perspective and utilizing Archer’s morphogenetic approach, we conducted a qualitative study of Tel Aviv’s established entrepreneurial ecosystem, including interviews with diverse women entrepreneurs and ecosystem actors, supplemented by archival data. Our findings reveal that women’s collective agency fosters inclusivity through bonding, bridging, and linking mechanisms and that sustained change requires multi-actor involvement, emphasizing an inclusive mindset and collective vision in the ecosystem. We develop a process model of social change to illustrate how it unfolds cyclically through phases of structural conditioning, sociocultural interaction, and structural elaboration, leading to different ecosystem outcomes, namely awareness, responsiveness, and transformativeness. This study provides insights into the interplay between agency and structure, underscoring the importance of collective efforts in addressing systemic gender inequalities within EEs.
