Beyond the gender-neutral approach: Gender and entrepreneurship as an intertwined social practice

The chapter considers the social practice of co-producing gender and entrepreneurship to be a material and a semantic space in which meaningful collective actions are carried out and contextually organized. The field of entwined practices is the domain in which to study the nature and transformation of the activities called gender and entrepreneurship, as collective accomplishments sustained through interactions and mutual adjustments among the people involved in them. The first argument of the study of gender and entrepreneurship is that the concept itself of entrepreneurship, while pretending to be gender neutral, comprises a gender sub-text which renders maleness invisible and thus sustains the a-critical reproduction of hegemonic masculinity. This contention translates into the methodological choice of studying gender at the level of interactions and discursive practices; that is, in what entrepreneurs do and say when they are practicing gender and business at once. Indeed, to study women entrepreneurs without examining the gender structuring of entrepreneurship is to legitimate the ‘gender blindness’ which renders masculinity invisible and turns it into the universal parameter of entrepreneurial action, the model with which every entrepreneurial act must comply because it is the norm and the standard value. When masculinity is made invisible, the male entrepreneurial model is universalized and stripped of gender. Thus made universal, it is proposed or prescribed independently of a person’s gender: women who wish to become entrepreneurs are required to comply with an apparently neutral set of values, while men are required to comply with those of ‘entrepreneurial’ masculinity. Being a female and an entrepreneur may mean that the woman concerned has learnt to cross the boundaries between the two symbolic universes of male and female. We therefore assume that being a woman and an entrepreneur involves learning competent performance of both the practices connected with entrepreneurial activity and those connected with exhibiting the gender behaviour appropriate to it (Gherardi, 2015). Likewise, being a man and an entrepreneur may involve a positional rent yielded by gender membership. The two practices are not distinct. Indeed, they are intimately bound up with each other in the materiality of bodies, in discursive practices, and in the artifacts that mediate the relation between body and activity. Therefore the chapter seeks to describe the gendering of the social practice called entrepreneuring (Steyaert, 2007), since there is renewed interest in social practices among contemporary social theorists.