Women entrepreneurs and their ventures: complicating categories and contextualising gender

Women entrepreneurs and their ventures: complicating categories and contextualising gende

A web of opportunity or the same old story? Women digital entrepreneurs and intersectionality theory

This article critically analyses the manner in which intersectionality and related social positionality shape digital enterprise activities. Despite popular claims of meritocratic opportunity enactment within traditional forms of entrepreneurship, ascribed social characteristics intersect to influence the realisation of entrepreneurial potential. However, it is purported that the emerging field of digital entrepreneurship may act as a ‘great leveller’ due to perceived lower barriers to entry, disembodiment of the entrepreneurial actor and the absence of visible markers of disadvantage online. Using an interpretivist approach, we analyse empirical evidence from UK women digital entrepreneurs which reveals how the privileges and disadvantages arising from intersecting social positions of gender, race and class status are reproduced online. This analysis challenges the notion that the Internet is a neutral platform for entrepreneurship and supports our thesis that offline inequality, in the form of marked bodies, social positionality and associated resource constraints, is produced and reproduced in the online environment

Annual review article: Is it time to rethink the gender agenda in entrepreneurship research?

This article develops a critique of contemporary approaches to analysing the impact of gender upon entrepreneurial propensity and activity. Since the 1990s, increasing attention has been afforded to the influence of gender upon women’s entrepreneurial behaviour; such analyses have highlighted an embedded masculinity within the entrepreneurial discourse which privileges men as normative entrepreneurial actors. Whilst invaluable in revealing a prevailing bias which portrays women in deficit as entrepreneurial actors, their critique is limited in that they tend to position women as a proxy for the gendered subject. Analyses that fail to recognise gender as a human property with myriad articulations not only homogenise women as a category, but also ignore how gender manifests in all entrepreneurial phenomena. To progress debate, we engage more deeply with the notion of gender as a multiplicity by recognising its diversity and considering the implications of such for future studies of entrepreneurial activity

Racial capitalism and entrepreneurship: an intersectional feminist labour market perspective on UK self-employment

This article explains entrepreneurial activity patterns in the United Kingdom (UK) labour market using theories of racial capitalism and intersectional feminism. Using UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) Labour Force Survey (LFS) data 2018-19 and employing probit modelling techniques on employment modes, self-employment types, and work arrangements amongst differing groups, we investigate inequality in self-employment within and between socio-structural groupings of race, class and gender. We find that those belonging to non-dominant gender, race and socio-economic class groupings experience an intersecting set of entrepreneurial penalties, enhancing understanding of the ways multiple social hierarchies interact in self-employment patterns. This robust quantitative evidence challenges contemporary debates, policy and practice regarding the potential for entrepreneurship to offer viable income generation opportunities by those on the socio-economic margins. </p

Racial capitalism and entrepreneurship: an intersectional feminist labour market perspective on UK self-employment

This article explains entrepreneurial activity patterns in the United Kingdom (UK) labour market using theories of racial capitalism and intersectional feminism. Using UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) Labour Force Survey (LFS) data 2018-19 and employing probit modelling techniques on employment modes, self-employment types, and work arrangements amongst differing groups, we investigate inequality in self-employment within and between socio-structural groupings of race, class and gender. We find that those belonging to non-dominant gender, race and socio-economic class groupings experience an intersecting set of entrepreneurial penalties, enhancing understanding of the ways multiple social hierarchies interact in self-employment patterns. This robust quantitative evidence challenges contemporary debates, policy and practice regarding the potential for entrepreneurship to offer viable income generation opportunities by those on the socio-economic margins. </p