Challenging the Gendered Entrepreneurial Subject: Gender, Development, and the Informal Economy in India

Abstract

Challenging the gendered entrepreneurial SubjeCt gender, development, and the informal economy in india Natascia Boeri Bloomfield college, Usa the World Bank's premise that "gender equality is good business" characterizes the current gender and economic development model. Policymakers and development practitioners promote and encourage women's entrepreneurialism from the conviction that increasing women's market-based opportunities is key to lifting women, their families, and communities out of poverty, resulting in the construction of a gendered entrepreneurial subject. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with home-based garment workers in ahmedabad, india, this article questions the portrayal of women informal workers as entrepreneurs. employing a social reproduction framework, i argue that the exploitative characteristics of informal work (i.e., paying for the costs of production and its temporal/spatial characteristic) are falsely interpreted as features of entrepreneurialism (i.e., investment and autonomy). Because work is completed in the worker's own home, work and care become a mutual burden in which woman's sense of providing for her family is impeded by both these roles. a feminist social reproduction framework of embodied labor links women's responsibility for and contribution to family well-being with women's marginalized economic position. examining home-based work through this lens reveals the contradiction of the entrepreneurialism discourse.

“Bitten by the entrepreneur bug” – critiquing discourses on women owner-managers/entrepreneurs in the Kenyan and Omani newspapers

“…Women OMEs running high-tech ventures are therefore perceived and categorized by the media as being different and perhaps more "entrepreneurial" than those in other sectors. (Boeri, 2018). Women's empowerment can have a positive impact on society's perception of women OMEs' role in developing the economy and thus minimize cultural barriers.…”

The short or long end of the stick? Mothers’ social position and self‐employment status from a comparative perspective

“…Some single-country studies have demonstrated that mothers are pulled into self-employment to meet intensive mothering ideals, whilst avoiding the stigmatization of being a housewife (Bjuggren & Henrekson, 2018;Ekinsmyth, 2011;Patrick et al, 2016). In South Asia, Boeri (2018) and Kabeer (2000) show that home-based self-employment does not carry the same stigma as factory work,…”

“…After interviewing 60 self‐employed mothers in Australia, they conclude entrepreneur‐mothers’ motives for choosing self‐employment include the moral importance of (intensive) mothering, experienced time‐related conflicts and constraints in dependent employment, and perceptions that the available career options for mothers in organizational employment are intellectually unchallenging (Foley et al, 2018). Home‐based self‐employment has also been reported to be a work choice that does not violate gender norms against working mothers, nor against stay‐at‐home mothers (Bjuggren & Henrekson, 2018; Boeri, 2018; Kabeer, 2000). The mumpreneurship literature thus considers self‐employment to occupy the middle ground between home‐making and dependent employment through the more flexible organization of both time and income, as well as enabling women to fulfil conflicting obligations as good mothers and good workers (Boden, 1999; Carr, 1996; Ekinsmyth, 2011; Simoes et al, 2016).…”

Multiple Temporalities of Household Labour: The Challenge of Assessing Women's Empowerment

“…Stove-sector programmes thus closely follow the Women in Development initiatives of the 1970s, where gender vulnerability became a cornerstone for intervention by international development agencies (Ghertner, 2006); an ambition that has since gained traction with the 2000 Millennium Development Goals followed by the more recent United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals. The emergence of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves (GACC) in 2010 has carried the women's empowerment mantle forward (Goetz and Jenkins, 2016;Simon et al, 2014) and follows broader considerations of empowerment within rural development settings (Alkire et al, 2013;Alsop et al, 2005;Kabeer, 1999;Kabeer et al, 2013;Kishor and Subaiya, 2008) and informal, household work contexts (Boeri, 2018;Bose, 2007;Kantor, 2003). Within the clean cookstove sector, the objective of women's economic empowerment is presented as straightforward and uncontroversial.…”