“They don’t waste money on women”: Gendered entrepreneurial household firm dynamics and the total social organisation of labour

Baloyo, Mary Joy ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5391-9828 and Jones, Sally ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4760-5969 (2021) “They don’t waste money on women”: Gendered entrepreneurial household firm dynamics and the total social organisation of labour. In: Institute for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (ISBE) Conference 2021, 28 October 2021 - 29 October 2021, Cardiff, UK.

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Abstract

This research draws on gendered household dynamics to conduct a TSOL analysis of Entrepreneurial Household Firms (EHFs). We find that in EHFs, home-based businesses are essentially family businesses that are not recognized as such. As a result, this reproduces disadvantage for women with no formal employment contracts and are disproportionately represented in informal household work, often unpaid and invisible. We conclude that the presupposition of entrepreneurial household firms as a neutral-unified space disregards the unlevelled interrelationship between business economic work and household work. Instead, we argue that gendered household dynamics are negotiated between the medium of social relations, nepotism, entrepreneurship and unlevelled access to particular gendered resources for sustainable ventures.