Race‐ing, Classing and Gendering Racialized Women's Participation in Entrepreneurship

The number of racialized women entrepreneurs has grown exponentially in recent years. Despite this growing trend, these businesswomen are more likely to operate on a small scale; their labour‐intensive businesses are characterized by low profits and limited mobility. Two fields of research attempt to illuminate — albeit problematically — the complexity of this phenomenon. Research on ethnic/immigrant entrepreneurs underestimates the experiences of racialized women who are entrepreneurs in their own right. Meanwhile the literature on women's entrepreneurship essentializes and homogenizes women's entrepreneurship. Research approaching women's entrepreneurship using an intersectional approach is scanty. In this paper, I draw on empirical evidence from a qualitative study with women entrepreneurs of A fro‐ C aribbean descent. To provide a more nuanced understanding of racialized women entrepreneurs' experiences as entrepreneurs, I use D ill and Z ambrana's intersectional/interlocking systems of oppression framework, examining processes of gendering, classing and racialization within four domains: structural, disciplinary, hegemonic and interpersonal. Despite processes of differentiation, participants found creative and subversive ways to resist these processes.