Female entrepreneurship in the European Union: are gender equality policies othering women?

Abstract

This research aims to explore the gendered construction of the entrepreneurial discourse in the EU, engaging with post-structural feminist analysis. The purpose is to investigate the practice and process of female entrepreneuring performed by European political actors, involving policy makers, experts and stakeholders across Europe. In Europe only 30% of all entrepreneurs are women. It is a phenomenon that the EU is trying to tackle through gender equality policies. The risk of this kind of policy is the perpetration of a male-centered entrepreneurial discourse, which questions the roots of the principle of equality, as defined in the Maastricht Treaty and the European Charter of fundamental rights. Since the 1970s different scholars have been studying female entrepreneurship using different feminist theoretical approaches, focusing on the relations between gender and class, work and family etc. Those analyses underlined the gendered nature of the entrepreneurship concept, which tends to reproduce an androcentric entrepreneur mentality, making hegemonic masculinity invisible. Since EU gender equality policies are based upon the principle of equal treatment they risk to ´other´ and ´second-sex´ women entrepreneurs. Those policies are based upon specific assumptions, which do not question the liberal conceptualisation of the principle of equality. The objective of the research is to investigate the consequences of ‘othering’ and ‘second-sexing’ women entrepreneurs by European policies, focusing on European agendas and initiatives, such as: Strategy Europe 2020, European Network of Mentors for Women Entrepreneurs, Female Entrepreneurship Ambassadors, Entrepreneurship 2020 Action Plan. The research wants to open up space for future studies and political actions, in which gender plays a key role as both an analytical and political category. The research is also a contribution to the feminist debate on equality-difference, towards a discourse less rooted in binary oppositions.