New directions for entrepreneurship through a gender and disability lens

There is a dearth of studies exploring the intersection of gender and disability within entrepreneurship research. This is despite women’s entrepreneurship research encouraging an expansion of the research questions asked and approaches taken. As a contribution to this debate, the purpose of this paper is to develop an understanding of gender and disability as social categorizations which can shape entrepreneurial opportunities and experiences for disabled women entrepreneurs.

The paper offers an intersectional conceptual lens for the study of disabled women entrepreneurs to explore a concern for a particular social group – women – at a neglected point of intersection – disability – within the social setting of entrepreneurship. Guided by the research question (how can gender and feminist disability theory contribute to the development of an intersectional theoretical lens for future entrepreneurship research?), the potential for new theoretical insights to emerge in the entrepreneurship field is identified.

Through a gender and disability intersectional lens for entrepreneurship research, four theoretical synergies between gender and disability research are identified: the economic rationale; flexibility, individualism and meritocracy; and social and human capital. In addition to the theoretical synergies, the paper highlights three theoretical variances: the anomalous body and bodily variation; sexuality, beauty and appearance; and multiple experiences of care as potentially generative areas for women’s entrepreneurship research. The paper identifies new directions for future gender, disability and entrepreneurship research by outlining research questions for each synergy and variance which draw attention to disabled women entrepreneurs’ experiences of choice and control within and across different spaces and processes of entrepreneuring.

The conceptual intersectional lens offered to study disabled women’s entrepreneurship highlights new directions for exploring experiences of entrepreneuring at the intersection of disability and gender. The paper brings disability into view as a social category that should be of concern to feminist entrepreneurship researchers by surfacing different dimensions of experience to those currently explored. Through the new directions outlined, future research can further disrupt the prevailing discourse of individualism and meritocracy that perpetuates success as an individual’s responsibility, and instead offer the potential for richer understandings of entrepreneuring which has a gender and disability consciousness.