Gender, Organisations and Networks
Institutions are not gender neutral. Sociologists have long recognized that business organizations, and the environments in which they are based are gendered, and the gender is generally male. As Acker (1991: 166) has argued: “Individual men and particular groups of men do not always win in these processes, but masculinity always seems to symbolize self-respect for men at the bottom and power for men at the top, while confirming for both their gender’s superiority”. Since entrepreneurship is about organizations, and organizations which have, until now, been led by men, entrepreneurship too is gendered (Green and Cohen, 1995; Mirchandani, 1999; Ahl, 2006; Bird and Brush, 2002; Lewis, 2006). That is, the popular notions of the ‘entrepreneur’ — as hero, captain, adventurer, explorer — are undoubtedly masculine, and the features of entrepreneurship as an activity: risk-taking, innovation, emotional detachment, initiative, ambition align closer with the stereotyped notions of men, rather than women (Schein, 2001; Carli, 2006). Thus, to study women entrepreneurs without examining the gender structuring of entrepreneurship legitimizes the gender-blindness which renders masculinity invisible and thereby turns masculinity into “the universal parameter of entrepreneurial actions” (Bruni et al, 2004: 410).
While entrepreneurship is undoubtedly gendered, and recognized as so, the contexts in which entrepreneurship is practiced have been universalized and stripped of gender. The meaning and salience of gender varies according to entrepreneurial context because these settings denote particular occupations that “carry characteristic images of the kinds of people that should occupy them” (Kanter, 1977: 250). Imagine a firefighter, and you will probably conjure up an image of a strong, muscular male; think of a nurse and the image is likely to be of a caring female. Thus, gender is inherent not only in the organization, but is also inscribed in the jobs that take place within it, and the service or product that the organization produces. Business ownership is male-typed indeed, but in a society where women own 40 per cent of all firms, the association between actual numbers of women in entrepreneurship and gender stereotypes may be weakening. It is no longer unusual to see a woman in a management or ownership position (Powell et al, 2002). Instead, the general stereotype regarding women in business may be being replaced by more specific stereotypes regarding the type ofbusiness that men and women should own and operate.
Entrepreneurial settings are also important because they influence the shape and nature of working relations — determining the sex ratios of workforces, the likelihood of cross-sex or same- sex supervisor-subordinate and colleague linkages and interactions, and thereby the ways in which gender is “performed” on the job (West and Zimmerman, 1987). People perform their maleness or femaleness in different ways depending on the expectations and assumptions oftheir interactants and these expectations are in turn determined by the activity in which they are engaged. Since membership in a sex category may be invoked to discredit or legitimize their performance, the context in which gender is ‘done’, is highly relevant (West and Fenstermaker, 1993). Women entrepreneurs working in male-dominated sectors must deal with a greater proportion of opposite-sex colleagues, employees and associates than women based in typically female sectors. This means that it “is unquestionable that it [gender] will not intrude into the experience of self-employment” (Marlow et al, 2008: 337) for these nontraditional women. This is not to say that gender performance only occurs in cross-sex interactions (West and Fenstermaker, 1993). As Hanson and Blake (2008: 137) explain: “…Networks play an active role in the ongoing development of individual and group identities. Because networks are always about social interaction and the positioning of individuals relative to each other, they are also always about gender”. Thus, since gender is an identity that is negotiated and constructed in routine social interaction, examination of the challenges that nontraditional entrepreneurs may face in their daily associations with others is essential. This chapter is about those interactions.