A Gendered Cultural Care Perspective on Women's Self‐Employment in Mongolia

The authors develop a framework for women's self‐employment in Mongolia at the intersections of gender, culture, and care that go beyond current theories of female entrepreneurship that use deficit based and western centric approaches. Through a secondary analysis of these theories and data on gender and employment the authors show that women's unpaid care explains a large part of their entry into self‐employment in Mongolia, particularly in the informal economy. However, they highlight how women's self‐employment in this context demonstrates their resilience. This framework and reinterpretation of secondary data illuminates the supports and barriers to women's self‐employment in Mongolia within social, cultural, historical, and political contexts and highlights a feminist economics approach to this phenomenon. Looking closely into this unique and understudied context, population, and phenomenon the authors uncover important lessons about the ways self‐employment plays out in women's lives in Mongolia that reflect larger issues about their work in the informal economy.