Exploring everyday experiences of entrepreneurial labour: gender and work in collaborative workspaces of Athens

Abstract

This paper explores how gender shapes the everyday experiences of entrepreneurial labour in Greek collaborative workspaces (CWS), highlighting a relatively understudied segment of coworking research. Drawing upon a wider study of collaborative workspaces in Athens, it explores how these spaces, which are the site of an enactment of entrepreneurial subjectivity, present themselves as gender-neutral but rest on highly masculinized assumptions about an archetypical masculine user of the space. Firstly, the article reveals divergence in the ways women and men entrepreneurs experience entrepreneurial labour. Secondly, it identifies how women entrepreneurs struggle to fit into narrow understandings of start-up entrepreneurship and innovation during the early stages of venture capital seeking. It then focuses on the way associations between bravery, risk and entrepreneurship appear in conversations with founders of CWS and are reinforced through their practice. Lastly, it examines how gendered structural constraints are rarely discussed by women start-up entrepreneurs. The article concludes by arguing that gender is not simply undone, but rather rearranged in a coworking landscape which is embedded in a start-up entrepreneurial context.