Doing Entrepreneurship in Uganda: the social construction of gendered identities of male and female entrepreneurs

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Doing Entrepreneurship in Uganda the social
construction of gendered identities of male and
female entrepreneurs

• Julius F. Kikooma (Ph.D)
• School of Psychology
• Makerere University

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Why a study on doing entrepreneurship?

• In Africa, years of data on entrepreneurship
  sends clear message to policy makers that the top
  four problems facing entrepreneurship in Africa
  are
• a low level of overall education and training
• social factors that do not encourage
  entrepreneurship as a career path of choice
• lack of access to finance, particularly in the
  micro-financing arena and
• a difficult regulatory environment.
• It is a refrain that GEM researchers have been
  singing for many years.

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In Uganda

• The overall perception is still negative and the
  policies and programmes have not been
  sufficiently well targeted.
• In an international comparison, Uganda is still
  underdeveloped in terms of physical and
  commercial infrastructure.
• A strong entrepreneurial spirit is wasted if the
  conditions handicap entrepreneurs in trying to
  compete at a global level.

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Why the gender dimension?

• In Uganda, women account for an increasing share
  of the self-employed, especially in small
  business sector and there is a growing
  recognition of the role the sector play in
  building the countrys economy.
• Yet womens progress in business ownership
  remains virtually invisible while a few
  demographic differences between mens and womens
  businesses are documented.

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What is the problem?

• Explanations of entrepreneurial experiences
  remain largely rooted in orthodox perspectives
  focused on comparisons of male and female
  entrepreneurs.
• Yet, such an approach does not illuminate how and
  why entrepreneurship came to be defined and
  understood in relation to the behaviour of only
  men.
• Therefore, despite the entrepreneurship
  literatures vastness and depth, there is a gap
  between womens experiences of the phenomenon and
  what explanations traditional research is
  producing in academic settings.

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Approach to the study

• Influenced by the narrative turn and encouraged
  by pioneers who have proposed alternative
  approaches to studying entrepreneurial practices,
  this study adopted a novel conceptual lens
  through which to approach research on the
  phenomenon of entrepreneurship.
• The lens frames entrepreneurship as being
  socially constructed.

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Social construction of entrepreneurship

• This standpoint suggests that gender and
  entrepreneurship are enacted and situated
  practices, and shows how the codes of a gendered
  identity are kept, changed and sometimes
  challenged.
• This suggests that as well as being an economic
  phenomenon, entrepreneurship can also be read as
  a cultural one in order to understand how gender
  and entrepreneurship are culturally produced and
  reproduced in social practices.

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Methodology

• A narrative type of inquiry was chosen because
  its theoretical assumptions resonate with the
  current studys definition of entrepreneurship.
• A choice was made to undertake a narrative
  inquiry because of three contributions that such
  an approach has been observed to make to research
  studies that emphasize interpretation, rather
  than prediction.

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Methodological Assumptions

• the stories entrepreneurs tell about their
  experiences in their entrepreneurial activities
  give us access to the arguments, intentions, and
  meanings that support entrepreneurship (narrative
  as language).
• entrepreneurship as practice is a legitimate
  source of knowledge from which to draw lessons
  about entrepreneurship, which can then be applied
  to other contexts (narrative as knowledge)
• even though an entrepreneur may actively resist
  societal structures of power, those structures
  may influence their work, producing incongruence
  between discourse and practice (narrative as
  metaphor).

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Entrepreneurial stories and the negotiation of
entrepreneurial identities

• Case stories in the study fell into three main
  categories
• bigmanship,
• African woman, and
• cultural entrepreneurship stories.

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Bigmanship

• This was a category of stories of a culturally
  idealized form of masculine character.
• Such stories came in two forms
• hegemonic masculinity
• gender neutrality

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African woman stories

• These were women entrepreneurs stories of
  challenges, perseverance and triumph
• These stories came in two forms
• gendered identity and
• manoeuvring space stories.

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Cultural entrepreneurship stories

• provide narratives that tell of the meanings that
  entrepreneurs attach to, and the strategies for,
  success they adopt.
• the precursors to tangible business outcomes were
  a mixture of a number of actors, action processes
  and events, as well as chance.

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Conclusion

• Although entrepreneurship can take various
  implicit and explicit forms, it is the case that
  gender struggle is integral to entrepreneurs
  expressions of gender relations in Uganda.
  Indeed, one may even characterize some of the
  female entrepreneurs struggles as efforts to
  push the cultural boundaries in their quest for
  wealth-creation.

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and finally?

• It is my hope that this work will advance the
  understanding of the needs of aspiring and
  existing female entrepreneurs, and will provide
  policy insights useful to developing and
  enhancing an environment in which the spirit of
  womens entrepreneurship may flourish.