Women Entrepreneurship in Turkey: Construction of Gender Identities and Practices

Mainstream research often promotes women’s entrepreneurship as an effective solution to women's subordination at home and in the workplace whereas recent feminist and critical research questions the desirability of entrepreneurship for women and its potential for empowerment. This study adopts a critical approach to understanding how gender affects entrepreneurship, how the latter changes gender identity, and the consequences for gender equality and social change. Given the diversity and inherent contradictions in women’s identity constructions and strategies, and the need for more studies in under-researched contexts, we contribute to extant literature by showing the possibilities and limits of entrepreneurship in challenging gendered hierarchies within both the household and business environments in Turkey. From a social constructivist perspective, we focus on how women entrepreneurs construct their identities and navigate gendered practices. Based on narratives of women entrepreneurs, we have two sets of findings. First, women entrepreneurs construct their identities by positioning themselves between traditional femininity and the masculine nature of entrepreneurship in both personal and business relationships. Second, we observe that women are ‘doing gender’ through practices of ‘overworking’, ‘instrumental masculinity’, and ‘redoing gender’ by ‘reconfiguring conjugal roles’, ‘utilizing feminine qualities’, and ‘developing a sense of collective consciousness’. Our overall conclusion is that although women entrepreneurs aspire to challenge gendered hierarchies, and some succeed, the impact of these efforts remain limited.