Doing Entrepreneurship in Uganda: the social construction of gendered

identities of male and female entrepreneurs

Julius F. Kikooma (Ph.D)School of PsychologyMakerere University

Why a study on doing entrepreneurship?• In Africa, years of data on entrepreneurship

sends clear message to policy makers that the top four problems facing entrepreneurship in Africa are: – a low level of overall education and training; – social factors that do not encourage

entrepreneurship as a career path of choice; – lack of access to finance, particularly in the

micro-financing arena; and – a difficult regulatory environment.

• It is a refrain that GEM researchers have been singing for many years.

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In Uganda • The overall perception is still negative and the

policies and programmes have not been sufficiently well targeted.

• In an international comparison, Uganda is still underdeveloped in terms of physical and commercial infrastructure.

• A strong entrepreneurial spirit is wasted if the conditions handicap entrepreneurs in trying to compete at a global level.

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Why the gender dimension?• In Uganda, women account for an increasing

share of the self-employed, especially in small business sector and there is a growing recognition of the role the sector play in building the country’s economy.

• Yet women’s progress in business ownership remains virtually invisible while a few demographic differences between men’s and women’s businesses are documented.

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What is the problem?

• Explanations of entrepreneurial experiences remain largely rooted in orthodox perspectives focused on comparisons of male and female entrepreneurs.

• Yet, such an approach does not illuminate how and why entrepreneurship came to be defined and understood in relation to the behaviour of only men.

• Therefore, despite the entrepreneurship literature’s vastness and depth, there is a gap between women’s experiences of the phenomenon and what explanations traditional research is producing in academic settings.

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Approach to the study

• Influenced by the narrative turn and encouraged by pioneers who have proposed alternative approaches to studying entrepreneurial practices, this study adopted a novel conceptual lens through which to approach research on the phenomenon of entrepreneurship.

• The lens frames entrepreneurship as being socially constructed.

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Social construction of entrepreneurship• This standpoint suggests that gender and

entrepreneurship are enacted and situated practices, and shows how the codes of a gendered identity are kept, changed and sometimes challenged.

• This suggests that as well as being an economic phenomenon, entrepreneurship can also be read as a cultural one in order to understand how gender and entrepreneurship are culturally produced and reproduced in social practices.

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Methodology• A narrative type of inquiry was chosen

because its theoretical assumptions resonate with the current study’s definition of entrepreneurship.

• A choice was made to undertake a narrative inquiry because of three contributions that such an approach has been observed to make to research studies that emphasize interpretation, rather than prediction.

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Methodological Assumptions • the stories entrepreneurs tell about their experiences in

their entrepreneurial activities give us access to the arguments, intentions, and meanings that support entrepreneurship (narrative as language).

• entrepreneurship as practice is a legitimate source of knowledge from which to draw lessons about entrepreneurship, which can then be applied to other contexts (narrative as knowledge)

• even though an entrepreneur may actively resist societal structures of power, those structures may influence their work, producing incongruence between discourse and practice (narrative as metaphor).

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Entrepreneurial stories and the negotiation of entrepreneurial identities

• Case stories in the study fell into three main categories: • bigmanship, • African woman, and • cultural entrepreneurship stories.

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Bigmanship

• This was a category of stories of a culturally idealized form of masculine character.

• Such stories came in two forms:• hegemonic masculinity• gender neutrality

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‘African woman’ stories• These were women entrepreneurs’

stories of challenges, perseverance and triumph• These stories came in two forms: • gendered identity and • manoeuvring space stories.

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Cultural entrepreneurship stories• provide narratives that tell of the meanings

that entrepreneurs attach to, and the strategies for, success they adopt.

• the precursors to tangible business outcomes were a mixture of a number of actors, action processes and events, as well as chance.

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Conclusion

• Although entrepreneurship can take various implicit and explicit forms, it is the case that gender struggle is integral to entrepreneurs’ expressions of gender relations in Uganda. Indeed, one may even characterize some of the female entrepreneurs’ struggles as efforts to push the cultural boundaries in their quest for wealth-creation.

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…and finally?

• It is my hope that this work will advance the understanding of the needs of aspiring and existing female entrepreneurs, and will provide policy insights useful to developing and enhancing an environment in which the spirit of women’s entrepreneurship may flourish.

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