Margins of intervention? : Gender, Bourdieu and women’s regional entrepreneurial networks

Harrison, Richard T and Leitch, Claire M and McAdam, Maura (2024) Margins of intervention? : Gender, Bourdieu and women’s regional entrepreneurial networks. Entrepreneurship and Regional Development, 36 (3-4). pp. 209-242. ISSN 0898-5626

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Abstract

In this paper, we apply a feminist interpretation and an extension of Bourdieu’s theory of practice to explore the gap in our understanding between gender gap issues – the institutionalized and structural inequalities that underpin the differential access to resources by women and men – and women business owners. Drawing on an interpretivist analysis of the lived experience of women entrepreneurs who were members of women-only or open-to-all formal entrepreneurship networks, we examine their enculturation and the strategies they employ to be deemed credible players in the field. We conclude that women-only formal entrepreneurship networks have had a limited impact on helping these women overcome the isolating and individualizing effects of a gendered entrepreneurial field. Despite the promise of familiarization with and sensitization to the field, women-only formal entrepreneurship networks only serve to perpetuate and reproduce the embedded masculinity of the entrepreneurship domain in the absence of appropriate activating mechanisms or ‘margins of intervention’.