acase@tulane.edu / Abstract
This research seeks to further the understanding of female microentrepreneurship as it is conceptualized and applied to initiatives that supporting women’s economic and social empowerment. Social norms, institutional discrimination, and gender constraints define the activities and persons that are entrepreneurial, thereby affecting female microenterprise motivations, characteristics, and success. In addition, contemporary microenterprise initiatives draw on women’s stereotypical caret-taking roles to justify their economic development, while female microenterprises remain distinguishable by their informality, small size, and low returns. The enterprises created through resource allocation programs, such as microcredit, are largely informal and home-based subsistence enterprises that offer a low-quality employment option to women and fail to challenge or expand existing gender constraints. Data from focus group participants and analysis of survey responses from 487 female microentrepreneurs in Kandy, Sri Lanka are used to compare female microentrepreneurial success in terms of both financial and empowerment outcomes. A novel conceptualization of the capabilities approach is presented and utilized to build an original analytical framework that redefines success in terms of women’s capabilities: whether female microentrepreneurship expands what they can be and do. An iterative approach to defining success outcomes establishes that adding empowerment indicators to definitions of success highlight different gender constraints to female microentrepreneurship than purely financial measures. Group differences provide an analysis of the gender constraints that are more prevalent among those meeting compound definitions of success and those who do not. A logistic regression of gender constraints, including personal household, and business characteristics, and women’s capabilities (as a proxy for empowerment), determines the impact of each constraint on the likelihood of being successful. The results suggest that, at the microenterprise level, female entrepreneurs are constrained by social and household norms that reduce their capabilities and enterprise success. Women’s hybrid entrepreneurial motivations, driven by their own economic and household considerations rather than outcomes desired by development initiatives, are established as offering fertile ground for future research, specifically regarding the impact of the household context. It is suggested that the motivations are distinct from those of women operating larger SMEs and require specific attention / 1 / Melissa E Langworthy
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TULANE/oai:http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/:tulane_79064 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Contributors | Langworthy, Melissa (author), Sloan, Dauphine (Thesis advisor), Samarasinghe, Stanley (Thesis advisor), du Buhr, Elke (Thesis advisor), Dudley, Meredith (Thesis advisor), Vechbanyongratana, Jessica (Thesis advisor), School of Law International Development (Degree granting institution) |
| Publisher | Tulane University |
| Source Sets | Tulane University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | electronic, 509 |
| Rights | No embargo, Copyright is in accordance with U.S. Copyright law. |
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