Women Entrepreneurship:Painting It Bright While Missing the Dark

This paper critically analyses the ongoing global and Indian narratives and actions related to women entrepreneurship which shows a consistent long-held focus on its benefits, particularly construing it as a means to women empowerment. These brightening dominant narratives miss the costs that women entrepreneurs pay and their sources. Based on the recent research on critical entrepreneurship, the authors foreground the invisible and argue that the source of the costs is the male-dominant masculine structure that underlies the conceptualization and actions related to entrepreneurship. The costs, particularly related to emotional labor which even the recent research ignores, and its source disempower women entrepreneurs. Hence, for the talks and actions on women entrepreneurship to be meaningful, we need broader discussions of affective or emotional, cognitive-structural and behavioral costs that women entrepreneurs are made to bear in their day-to-day life and an interrogation of the masculine entrepreneurship-related discourses and actions.