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Beyond stereotypes: The story of a single-woman entrepreneur in a patriarchal society
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This paper aims to enrich both the Entrepreneurship as Practice (EAP) and female entrepreneurship literature by advancing the existing insight that gender and entrepreneurship are interconnected practices. It contends that the enactment of entrepreneurship and gender is contextually contingent. To this end, we reinitiate the discourse on situational definition within the EAP framework, employing Butler's performativity and intersubjectivity concepts. We posit that the interplay of gender and entrepreneurial endeavors yields distinct practices influenced by the individual's identity and social affiliation within intersubjective and performative processes. A partici-patory ethnographic study spanning three years, conducted within a women-centric technology incubator, exposes the incubation process as a hub of interactions facilitated by intersubjectivity. It functions both as an educational medium for "praxis" and as a catalyst driving progressive performativity, distinctively expressed by each female entrepreneur contingent upon their individual attributes. This research enriches the EAP literature by revealing divergent gender enactments across industries and individuals. Furthermore, it augments female entrepreneurship literature by enhancing our understanding of how women, irrespective of contextual variables, effectively cultivate micro ventures through practical engagement.
Using the theoretical lens of identity work, the objective of the article is to explore how the identity of an entrepreneurial, female, artisan food producer is constructed and enacted. Emphasis is given to a gendered examination of how artisan and entrepreneur as facets of identity co-exist, compete or integrate. The article relies on a phenomenologically oriented case study that comprises numerous sources including primary data from multiple, in-depth, interviews. The data are used to examine identity work undertaken by the case subject across the following categories: dramaturgical, socio-cognitive, psycho-dynamic, discursive and symbolic. The article makes a modest contribution to furthering understanding of the female entrepreneurial identity from a novel perspective.
Women entrepreneurship research in the developing world relies on theoretical perspectives derived elsewhere. Hence, understanding the original business-development approaches adopted by women entrepreneurs in developing economies remains elusive. Accordingly, we collected and analyzed rich data generated through 31 in-depth interviews and artifacts of
Nigerian women entrepreneurs in the garment manufacturing business. Our analysis revealed distinct constructs that account for their business-development activities. It shows money (access and utilization), market (customer intelligence), and management (nonformal education and experience) as crucial enterprise development components in women entrepreneurship. Motherhood (household responsibilities), meso- and macro-environments (socioeconomic and cultural factors) not only affected business development but also inhibited women entrepreneurs’ access and utilization of money, management, and markets and shaped their business development actions. Theoretical and practical implications for entrepreneurship research and policy development initiatives in the developing world are offered.
Under the pressure of always increasing demands of publication, excessive working hours are widespread in academia. Based on an autoethnography of myself as a pregnant woman under Covid, I explore the extent of my being caught by the illusio - “being taken in and by the game” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992), that prompted me to remain absorbed by the publishing game and to overwork until the very last day before giving birth to my son. I also explore how the forced deceleration induced by the maternity leave as well as the Covid confinement contributed to increased awareness and reflection thus helping me to transcend the illusio that prompted me to overwork. I also reflect to the extent of this conversion being reversible given the continued pressures of the academic context.
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The paper provides my personal experience as a COVID‐19 survivor during and post‐recovery periods. The stigma that my children and I underwent exposed us to the fragility of a social system that we struggle with all through our life to remain a part of. My story revealed a strong symbiotic relationship between the disease (COIVD‐19) and the patient's low acceptance in society, primarily attributed to misinformation and xenophobia around the COVID‐19. This autoethnography speaks for several other COVID survivors who met with the same fate of being discriminated against and stigmatized. As a COVID patient and survivor, the traumatic experience was creating a fear psychosis in me, the effect of which I presume will stay beyond COVID‐19. This condition of a Syndemic seems to linger and negatively affect my outlook towards society. If COVID survivors develop a Syndemic condition in a pandemic situation, it will require significant efforts to reserve it or sometimes even become irreversible. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Studies of gender in entrepreneurship acknowledge that gender norms are at the root of women’s disadvantage in resource‐acquisition but provide limited guidance on how societal (macro‐level) norms and their gendering influence entrepreneurs’ micro‐level behaviors and stakeholders’ decisions within local contexts. To address this lacuna, we draw on gender theory and French Pragmatist Sociology (FPS) to offer G‐FPS: an analytical and methodological framework of resource‐claiming as a process of justifying, engaging and testing, embedded in normative context that constructs gender roles and social worth. Through analysis of a historical case of business resource‐acquisition in pre‐state Israel, we theorize and demonstrate how local gendered norms steered men and women to diverge in their justifications and self‐presentation when making their claims, and how stakeholders evaluated those claims according to their fit with situated gender expectations. We thus illustrate how macro‐level gender norms infiltrate and operate within micro‐level processing, persistently favoring men over women.
Critical scholarship has challenged traditional assumptions of entrepreneurship as a 'neutral' economic activity; demonstrating instead how entrepreneurship is a cultural phenomenon. In particular, enterprise culture has been exposed as fundamentally masculinist, so that women entrepreneurs are said to be measured against gendered values and ideals. What remains relatively unexplored, however, are the ways the identity performances of women entrepreneurs on social media reflect and reproduce inequalities that extend beyond gender. In this article, we examine how highly privileged Australian women entrepreneurs perform their identities on Instagram. In applying intersectionality theory, our study finds that the entrepreneurs produced idealised feminine identities by leveraging the intersections of white, elite class, heteronormative, able-bodied power within a broader neoliberal discourse. In doing so, our analysis points to how romanticised ideals of women's economic empowerment in digital spaces may obscure the perpetuation of systemic and structural oppression.
The research in this chapter aims to examine the extent of sexual harassment (SH) in public spaces post-Nirbhaya, an event that occurred in Delhi, India, in 2012, with a focus on victims, self-reported behaviors of offenders, and offenders’ male friends. More specifically, we examine the concordance rates between victims and offenders as well as offenders and their male friends’ SH offending patterns. Findings from a survey of 766 females and 629 males in the Delhi National Capital Territory suggest that 61 percent of women experienced one or more forms of sexual harassment, and 51 percent of men reported having engaged in one or more forms of these behaviors. Findings also suggest that although over 95 percent of the victims and offenders are aware of the Nirbhaya incident, more than half of them are not aware of the existence of laws that punish sexual harassment. Close to two-thirds do not believe the effectiveness of these laws and their enforcement. Policy implications are discussed and suggested, drawing from the findings of this research.
That unmarried individuals die at a faster rate than married individuals at all ages is well documented. Unmarried women in developing countries face particularly severe vulnerabilities, so that excess mortality faced by the unmarried is more extreme for women in these regions compared to developed countries. We provide systematic estimates of the excess female mortality faced by older unmarried women in developing regions. We place these estimates in the context of the missing women phenomenon. There are approximately 1.5 million missing women between the ages of 30 and 60 years old each year. We find that 35% of these missing women of adult age can be attributed to not being married. These estimates vary by region. India has the largest proportion of missing adult women who are without a husband, followed by the countries in East Africa. By contrast, China has almost no missing unmarried women. We show that 70% of missing unmarried women are of reproductive age and that it is the relatively high mortality rates of these young unmarried women (compared to their married counterparts) that drive this phenomenon.
The aim of this essay is to illuminate the lived experiences of Victoria—an undocumented immigrant woman of Mexican origin working and living in the United States. Drawing on an in-depth interview conducted with Victoria following the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, we identify a set of discursive and material conditions that inform her lived reality. By examining three mutually constituting stages of Victoria’s life, we invite readers to consider how the imbricated nexus between global manifestations of colonization, migration, and the political rise of right-wing extremism is embodied and negotiated locally by one particular woman. To aid in theoretically informing the excerpts provided by Victoria, we draw on Judith Butler’s recent works in which she develops, individually and collaboratively, ideas of dispossession and precariousness. We find that dispossession and precariousness foreground the currents of vulnerability that are located palpably in Victoria’s narrative. Finally, by engaging with a genre of feminine writing that collapses the traditional boundaries between theory and practice, we revisit the question of praxis in relation to the researchers’ responsibility toward the participants of their study.
In this paper, we apply insights from poststructuralist feminist theory to contribute to entrepreneurial leadership. By drawing on 21 individual narratives with Lebanese women entrepreneurs, we explore how they determine their status as entrepreneurial leaders and establish their entrepreneurial identities. Although the factors of gender, sociocultural values, and agency can be counteractive, it is agency that creates space for entrepreneurship for women and provides them a means to navigate structural inequalities. The entrepreneurs in this study engage in compliance, disregard, and defiance strategies to expand the boundaries of what is socially permissible for women and to strengthen their identities. This research contributes to studies on entrepreneurial leadership and aids in the development of theory by demonstrating how Arab women construct entrepreneurial leadership, agency, and identity at the juncture of patriarchy, sociocultural values, and gender ideologies.
This paper critically analyses how gender bias impacts upon women’s efforts to legitimate nascent ventures. Given the importance of founder identity as a proxy for entrepreneurial legitimacy at nascency, we explore the identity work women undertake when seeking to claim legitimacy for their emerging ventures in a prevailing context of masculinity. In so doing, we challenge taken for granted norms pertaining to legitimacy and question the basis upon which that knowledge is claimed. In effect, debates regarding entrepreneurial legitimacy are presented as gender neutral yet, entrepreneurship is a gender biased activity. Thus, we argue it is essential to recognise how gendered assumptions impinge upon the quest for legitimacy. To illustrate our analysis, we use retrospective and real time empirical evidence evaluating legitimating strategies as they unfold, our findings reveal tensions between feminine identities such as ‘wife’ and ‘mother’ and those of the prototypical entrepreneur. This dissonance prompted women to undertake specific forms of identity work to bridge the gap between femininity, legitimacy and entrepreneurship. We conclude by arguing that the pursuit of entrepreneurial legitimacy during nascency is a gendered process which disadvantages women and has the potential to negatively impact upon the future prospects of their fledging ventures.
Neoliberalism is produced on and through the terrain of gendered meanings. Gender naturalizes capitalist relations and addresses and constitutes subjects across economic arenas. As the unmarked side of the pair, masculinity is too often overlooked in these processes, thus obscuring both the masculine character of elite performances and the growing relegation of non-elite men to the margins of the economy. Ethnographic immersion in two pivotal sites of neoliberal emergence at the nexus of the Mexican and global economies—one in production and one in finance—provides a window onto the enactment of the post-Fordist global economy and into the role of gendered subjectifying processes in propelling it forward. This analysis reveals the role of gender in the global dispersal of production and the incitement and legitimation of transnational finance, thus throwing empirical light on the routine functioning of actually existing capitalism.
The notion of postfeminism has become one of the most important in the lexicon of feminist cultural an alysis. Yet there is little agreement about what postfeminism is. This article argues that postfeminism is best understood as a distinctive sensibility, made up of a number of interrelated themes. These include the notion that femininity is a bodily property; the shift from objectification to subjectification; an emphasis upon self-surveillance, monitoring and self-discipline; a focus on individualism, choice and empowerment; the dominance of a makeover paradigm; and a resurgence of ideas about natural sexual difference. Each of these is explored in some detail, with examples from contemporary Anglo-American media. It is precisely the patterned articulation of these ideas that constitutes a postfeminist sensibility. The article concludes with a discussion of the connection between this sensibility and contemporary neoliberalism.
This article proposes to open the black box behind women’s behavior toward financing by looking at the influence that incubation structures can have in their support role. Based on qualitative empirical research and 23 semistructured interviews conducted with women entrepreneurs supported by two support structures (one mixed and the other gendered), our results identify the major contribution of entrepreneurial support to the financing trajectories of women entrepreneurs. Our results present the good practices of these structures in the support and mentoring of women in terms of financing and allow us to question the contribution of gendered and nongendered support. Thanks to these results, we also present recommendations for practitioners; that is, public authorities and actors in the entrepreneurial ecosystem that accompany and support women entrepreneurs.
Women entrepreneurship literature has unveiled the gendered assumptions of entrepreneurship. More recently, critical woman entrepreneurship literature is increasingly focusing on the neoliberal discourses in women entrepreneurship. What remains relatively under‐explored is how women entrepreneurs experience the tensions amidst neoliberal and gendered experiences especially in the context of the Global South. Based on the narratives of middle to upper‐middle‐class women entrepreneurs in India, I find that being middle to upper‐middle‐class, women entrepreneurs shared a sense of attaining a neoliberal agency through entrepreneurship, so much so that they ignored, denied, or naturalized the gendered constraints in entrepreneurship. However, soon their accounts reflected an underlying tension as they admitted facing gendered constraints while previously denying them. I contribute to the literature of women entrepreneurship by theorizing the conflicting narratives of women entrepreneurs using the concept of liminality. In doing so, I extend the concept of liminality as an in‐between position of neoliberal and gendered experiences.
Much of what has hitherto been written about women’s lived experiences of the coronavirus pandemic takes their status as mothers and the spouses of men for granted. Skewed care demands on women researchers working from home may translate into individual career disadvantage and cumulative, large‐scale gender inequalities in the future, which is undeniably a serious issue. However, the narrative that single, childfree women must currently, by contrast, be unconcernedly enjoying a surge of productivity needs to be nuanced. Therefore, with this paper, I autoethnographically discuss how living alone in the context of the Covid‐19 pandemic provides its own set of circumstances and is hardly problem‐free, which affects how one can deal with issues of academic productivity and work‐life balance. Also, I take issue with the premise that our productivity is the golden standard against which we and our worth should be measured while we are living through a global crisis.
Purpose
The purpose of this short commentary reflects upon how feminist theory might be used to advance the contemporary gendered critique of women’s entrepreneurship. Drawing from gender theory, a diverse and complex critique has arisen to challenge the discriminatory discourse of entrepreneurship that fundamentally disadvantages women. To progress debate, the author suggests that greater attention should be afforded to feminist theories as explanatory analyses for such subordination and particularly to challenge contemporary postfeminist ideas which fuel a false promise of entrepreneurship for women.
Design/methodology/approach
A conceptual paper drawing upon extant literature to develop suggestions for future research .
Findings
Conceptual arguments challenging current approaches to analysing the relationship between women, gender and entrepreneurship.
Research limitations/implications
Somewhat controversially, it is suggested that such a critique might encourage us to refocus research such that it challenges, rather than seeks to confirm, the axiom that under current conditions, entrepreneurship is “good” for women and society so ergo, we need more women entrepreneurs. Greater acknowledgement of feminist theory will also facilitate a stronger intersectional analysis, vital if we are to acknowledge how socio-economic and contextual diversity constrains or enables entrepreneurial behaviour.
Social implications
This article challenges contemporary researchers to reconsider current thinking regarding the value of entrepreneurial activity for women.
Originality/value
The commentary concludes by identifying how the next generation of scholars might take such ideas forward to build upon established foundations.
This article argues that the concept of “hegemonic masculinity” remains highly salient to critical masculinities studies. The author outlines Raewyn Connell's initial formulation of the concept, how that initial model of hegemonic masculinity has been historically misinterpreted, the reformulation of the concept by Connell and Messerschmidt, and the recent scholarly amplification of the concept. The author concludes that Connell’s original emphasis on the legitimation of unequal gender relations remains essential to both the concept and to the field of critical masculinities studies.
This book explores the ways in which neoliberal capitalism has reshaped the lives of working-class men around the world. It focuses on the effects of employment change and of new forms of governmentality on men’s experiences of both public and private life. The book presents a range of international studies—from the US, UK, and Australia to Western and Northern Europe, Russia, and Nigeria—that move beyond discourses positing a ‘masculinity crisis’ or pathologizing working-class men. Instead, the authors look at the active ways men have dealt with forms of economic and symbolic marginalization and the barriers they have faced in doing so. While the focus of the volume is employment change, it covers a range of topics from consumption and leisure to education and family.
Book synopsis: Research Methods in Psychology has been substantially revised in its fourth edition. Continuing to offer enviable coverage of the research methods that psychology students at intermediate levels need to cover in their course, the textbook has now been broadened to cover the full suite of beginner level research methods too. The result is extensive coverage of psychological methods, both quantitative and qualitative, and a textbook that will serve students perfectly from day one in their course at university.
The purpose of this article is to advance a new understanding of gender as a routine accomplishment embedded in everyday interaction. To do so entails a critical assessment of existing perspectives on sex and gender and the introduction of important distinctions among sex, sex category, and gender. We argue that recognition of the analytical independence of these concepts is essential for understanding the interactional work involved in being a gendered person in society. The thrust of our remarks is toward theoretical reconceptualization, but we consider fruitful directions for empirical research that are indicated by our formulation.
This article contributes to the recent stream of research on enterprise and identity by exploring the authenticity-driven identity work of a group of women business owners. While previous research has highlighted the effort some female business owners put into fitting in with the masculine identity of the entrepreneur, this article focuses on those women who self-consciously adopt a feminized entrepreneurial identity as a means of being ‘who I really am’ in a business context. Nevertheless, despite their expressed commitment to a feminized identity, the article highlights their incorporation of a contrasting position or antagonism in this authenticity-driven endeavour. Drawing on Charme's notion of existential authenticity, which places an emphasis on the cultural, historical, political, economic and physical limits to being ‘true to oneself’, the article shows how the situated nature of women's search for an authentically driven entrepreneurial identity means that they draw on a feminized discourse of difference and a contrasting masculine discourse of professionalism in their identity construction labours.
While there is a substantial body of literature exploring the influence of business incubation upon early stage firms, this debate remains almost entirely gender blind. This article challenges this assumption by adopting a feminist perspective to reveal business incubation as a gendered process shaping the identity work undertaken by women seeking legitimacy as technology venturers. In so doing, we critically evaluate prevailing normative analyses of the business incubation process and entrepreneurial legitimation. To illustrate this argument, we draw upon empirical evidence which reveals technology incubation as a legitimating induction process encouraging women to reproduce masculinized representations of the normative technology entrepreneur.
The number of women entrepreneurs is rising rapidly and many are creating substantial businesses. For most women-led ventures, growth is funded by personal investment and debt, although a small percentage draw on private equity investment to fuel high growth. Of those that seek growth, not only do they face higher obstacles in obtaining capital, but little is known about ways they position ventures for growth. This paper addresses the question: `How do women develop financing strategies to prove the business concept, meet early stage milestones, and demonstrate to external investors the value and potential of their businesses?' Data are drawn from phone interviews with 88 US female entrepreneurs seeking an equity investment to grow their businesses. The analysis examines the correspondence between bootstrapping and stage of business development. Results show significant differences in the use of bootstrap options utilized by women-led ventures depending on stage of business development. Companies that have not achieved sales were more likely to emphasize bootstrapping to reduce labour, while those companies with greater sales were more likely to minimize cost of operations. Implications for future research and education are suggested.
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