Premium
Becoming ‘Real’ Entrepreneurs: Women and the Gendered Normalization of ‘Work’
Author(s) -
Bourne Kristina A.,
Calás Marta B.
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
gender, work and organization
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.159
H-Index - 73
eISSN - 1468-0432
pISSN - 0968-6673
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-0432.2012.00591.x
Subject(s) - embodied cognition , ethnography , work (physics) , women entrepreneurs , normalization (sociology) , sex work , sociology , gender studies , female entrepreneurs , precarity , political science , entrepreneurship , social science , engineering , computer science , mechanical engineering , law , artificial intelligence , medicine , family medicine , human immunodeficiency virus (hiv) , anthropology
This article focuses on the way in which women entrepreneurs legitimate their place in a gendered economy by reifying a divide between ‘real work’ and ‘not‐real work’. Using ethnographic approaches to follow the everyday lives of several women who own and operate small businesses in the USA, our article documents three gendering practices the women use for ‘becoming real workers:’ embodied, spatial and temporal. The study shows that women entrepreneurs become ‘productive workers’ by recasting reproductive work as non‐productive or not‐real work. At the end, we explore two possible alternative conceptualizations of ‘work’ that could contribute to dissolving this gendered divide.