Authoring the female entrepreneur while talking the discourse of work–family life balance

Abstract

This article illustrates the gendering of entrepreneurship as an intertwined process of gendering and entrepreneuring that can commence from the analysis of a single situated practice. The practice I explore is deemed ‘authoring own-self as entrepreneur’, that is, how the ‘I’ is authored through narrative and discursive processes, mobilized in the presentation of a public identity within a community of entrepreneurs. This is illustrated by four ways of authoring the process of becoming a female entrepreneur in relation to gender and life issues: as a firm-creator, as a coauthor of a project, as a responsible wife, as a member of the second generation. In authoring entrepreneuring, discursive resources are mobilized and edited within a narrative of identity where the process of negotiating one of the major narratives in the field (the work–family life balance) is performed. The discourse on work–family life balance is traditionally constructed in dichotomous terms, and its gender subtext is taken for granted. It portrays a supposed universality of gender conditions based on the implicit assumptions that when women work their family life is under threat, that work and family are two separate and separable spheres of activities, that it is a women’s responsibility to keep them in balance, and finally that women in entrepreneurship, as in any other working environment, will be affected by the potential unbalance since their primary loyalty would be to reproduction and the home. On the contrary when female entrepreneuring is conceived as a life form, the discourse on work–family life balance is challenged.