Challenging the Gendered Entrepreneurial Subject: Gender, Development, and the Informal Economy in India

Abstract

The World Bank’s premise that “gender equality is good business” characterizes the current gender and economic development model. Policymakers and development practitioners promote and encourage women’s entrepreneurialism from the conviction that increasing women’s market-based opportunities is key to lifting women, their families, and communities out of poverty, resulting in the construction of a gendered entrepreneurial subject. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with home-based garment workers in Ahmedabad, India, this article questions the portrayal of women informal workers as entrepreneurs. Employing a social reproduction framework, I argue that the exploitative characteristics of informal work (i.e., paying for the costs of production and its temporal/spatial characteristic) are falsely interpreted as features of entrepreneurialism (i.e., investment and autonomy). Because work is completed in the worker’s own home, work and care become a mutual burden in which woman’s sense of providing for her family is impeded by both these roles. A feminist social reproduction framework of embodied labor links women’s responsibility for and contribution to family well-being with women’s marginalized economic position. Examining home-based work through this lens reveals the contradiction of the entrepreneurialism discourse.