Empowerment, Constraint, and the Entrepreneurial Self: A Study of White Women Entrepreneurs

Abstract

Discourses of entrepreneurship and research on women entrepreneurs have proliferated in the last two decades. This study argues that a particular conception of an entrepreneurial self underlies much literature on women entrepreneurs and their empowerment, and identifies several key assumptions of this entrepreneurial self. The study then assesses the motivations and experiences of several white women entrepreneurs in a northwestern state in the United States, finding that aspects of the entrepreneurial self are most evident in the reasons that women provide about why they became entrepreneurs. However, the experiences the women narrate reveal a more constraints-centered discourse, which features a particular interpretation of the frontier myth of the American West, and bears traces of an emergent, collective notion of empowerment. The authors explain such empowerment from critical and feminist perspectives, offering the concept of bounded empowerment as a lens through which to examine entrepreneurship and gender, and discussing its practical implications.

Keywords:

• Discourse
• Empowerment
• Entrepreneurial Self
• Entrepreneurship
• Frontier Myth
• Feminism
• Gender
• Intersectionality
• Whiteness

Acknowledgements

The data were drawn from Rebecca Gill's M.A. thesis project. Both authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, Sara Hayden, Greg Larson, Jeff Shay, and Heather Zoller for their useful feedback on various versions of this research. Most of all, they would like to thank the participants for narrating their experiences and making this study possible.

Notes

1. In this study, problems with balancing work and home obligations appeared most often among women with children. Women without children, both straight and lesbian, typically reported a shared balance of home responsibilities with their partners.

2. Hochschild and Machung (1989) [0]detail the psychological responsibility that women often have in households, despite partnerships where the wife and husband make honest attempts to split responsibilities.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rebecca Gill

Rebecca Gill (M.A., University of Montana) is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah

Shiv Ganesh

Shiv Ganesh (Ph.D., Purdue University) is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Management Communication at the University of Waikato Both authors contributed equally to this paper