Entrepreneurial activities of Canadian Bangladeshi women in Toronto: a family perspective

ABSTRACT

Applying a family lens, the study illustrates how family resources and gender roles shape the entrepreneurship pathways of immigrant women. With its focus on the family, the study contributes to intersectional research about immigrant entrepreneurs that considers the effects of gender and social class, as well as, ethnicity. Drawing on the narratives of Bangladeshi women who migrated to Toronto as spouses of skilled male immigrants, the research examines their decisions to start and operate home-based and non-home-based businesses. Though similar employment barriers faced many Bangladeshi couples in Toronto, gender roles and family resources influenced the women’s strategies to combat economic marginalisation and loss of middle-class status. The home-based businesses operated by Bangladeshi women required little financial capital and offered services and goods produced with domestic resources while the non-home-based businesses operated by Bangladeshi women often complemented existing family enterprises.

KEYWORDS:

• Canadian Bangladeshi women
• immigrant entrepreneurship
• family lens
• intersectionality

Acknowledgements

Based on the PhD dissertation of the first author, the study was conducted after obtaining approval from the The Office of Research Ethics (ORE) at York University, Toronto, Canada. All ethics protocols were maintained during the research and an informed consent form was provided to the research participants before interviews.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Canada recognizes common-law partners, as well as, married partners as spouses.

2 The first author who volunteered at the organization for six months to learn about the Bangladeshi community and develop relations with Bangladeshi women still participates in the organization’s activities.

3 The interviews, transcription, and translation were completed by the first author whose first language is Bengali.

4 Extended families are common in Bangladesh where the typical household in villages includes several generations. With industrialization, urbanization, socio-economic development and technological advancement, the extended family is being replaced by the nuclear family, particularly in urban areas. In the last three decades, the average family size has decreased from 8.26 to 5.57 due to the rise of nuclear families among middle class city dwellers (Samad 2015).

5 Canadian Bangladeshis, both men and women, are well-educated. According to the 2006 census, more than half of Bangladeshi men (57%) and 41.8% Bangladeshi women had a university degree. The men have high rates (85%) of labour market participation. Nevertheless, more than a third of Canadian Bangladeshi households in Toronto, 34.8%, had incomes below the low-income cut-off, almost five times the percentage of white immigrant households (7.7%).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration, Professor Anna Triandafyllidou, Ryerson University.