Understanding women’s performance of entrepreneurship in the Sri Lankan context

The aim of this study is to explore how women in Sri Lanka cultivate entrepreneurial personae to navigate the various gendered roles they situationally enact, as they attempt to secure legitimacy and acceptance, and overcome their otherness. Drawing on Goffman’s theorisation of symbolic interaction, this study investigates how gender informs the performance of entrepreneurship in Sri Lanka. In this way, our study engages with the challenges women in the Global South navigate while undertaking entrepreneurship, and it contributes to the critical entrepreneurship literature on the intertwined nature of gender and entrepreneurship. Following Feminist Standpoint Epistemology (FSE), our qualitative study focuses on women entrepreneurs in Sri Lanka by examining the performance of entrepreneurship through 44 Life History Interviews (LHIs) and 40 Field Observations conducted over a seven-month period. The findings reveal that women carefully cultivate entrepreneurial personae by striking a balance between entrepreneurial ideals and social expectations of womanhood. Our findings present how the entrepreneurial personae are constructed by way of appearance, mannerism, and setting, which presents opportunities for future research to explore the dramaturgical aspect of gender and entrepreneurship. This study contributes to the growing body of feminist research surrounding women entrepreneurs, by drawing on insights from the lived experiences of women entrepreneurs in the Global South. This study also expands Goffman’s theorisation of audience segregation and shows that a subject’s understanding of the audience shapes the personae. A further contribution of this research is how space becomes an extension of the personae at play