Exploring the Experiences of Women Social Entrepreneurs: Advancing Understandings of ‘Emotional Capital’ in Women-only Networks

Abstract

The field of social entrepreneurship, a domain focused on implementing solutions to social, cultural and environmental issues, remains highly male-dominated. Research continues to emphasise that women social entrepreneurs are often expected to behave in masculine ways in order to become successful. The study presented in this article explored the perceptions and experiences of thirty-three women living in the United Kingdom who were developing their skills in social entrepreneurship. Documenting their experiences, we sought to understand how women work in a male-dominated field. Our analysis primarily builds on a Bourdieusian-revisionist approach of emotional capital to advance understandings of how women’s networks with other women allow them to navigate social entrepreneurship. Drawing on emotional capital, as a theory, we examine the ways in which these women find these spaces generative and how it contributes to their problematising of masculine orthodoxies.

Keywords

emotional capital gender performativities social entrepreneurship

introduction

Social entrepreneurship—as a way to address social, cultural or environmental problems—has attracted a great deal of public attention during the last two decades. Social enterprises, which are often tied to local communities, aim to generate both economic and social benefits. Supported by numerous corporate, public and third-sector programmes, social enterprises show considerable commercial resilience in a range of business metrics: turnover growth, innovation, business optimism, start-up rates, diversity in leadership and more. Social Enterprise UK (2017) found that nearly a third of the UK’s social enterprises (which approximate 70,000) are start-ups, meaning that new companies are increasingly being launched with the aim to make the world a better place. Furthermore, over 70 per cent of social enterprises made a profit or broke even in 2017 (ibid.). Research continues to document how the advance of social entrepreneurial activities is intertwined with a ‘growing disillusionment of for-profit business models’ (Phillips et al., 2015, p. 428).

However, while the mission of a social entrepreneur is generally benevolent, the ecosystem of social entrepreneurship is far from equitable. Studies over the last twenty years have documented that female social entrepreneurs are at a disadvantage in a male-dominated profession (Weiler and Bernaske, 2001; Ahl, 2004, 2006; Berdahl, 2007; Scott et al., 2012; Patton, 2013; Henry, Foss and Ahl, 2015), raising significant issues concerning how women, who are often in the minority, adapt to the gender norms embedded in social entrepreneurship. As Lionel Wee and Ann Irene Brooks (2012, p. 578) note: ‘Female entrepreneurship is presented within a context of “othering” and measured against a male norm’. Nuancing the role of women in social entrepreneurship further, Susan Clark Muntean and Banu Ozkazanc-Pan (2016, p. 225) call attention to the fact that ‘women and femininity are considered the best “fit” with microenterprise, limited scale, slow growth and socially oriented ventures, whereas rapid growth-oriented, scalable, highly regarded and resourced firms remain the male and organization domain’.

The growth of social entrepreneurship has also led to the development of incubators—or what Pandey et al. (2017) call ‘social accelerators’—which foster ‘value-creating’ activities with ‘a wide range of stakeholders who work through networks to co-create and meet social challenges’ (Nicolopoulou et al., 2017, p. 368). These social accelerators have had a ‘profound impact on social entrepreneurship practice by identifying and supporting innovative social entrepreneurs through training, mentoring and other means’ (Pandey et al., 2017, p. 89). Ozkazanc-Pan and Clark Muntean (2018, p. 386) note that women social entrepreneurs who are part of an incubator value the networking experiences and mentorship, and that ‘they see connections as more relational and on a longer time horizon, while they believe men are more transactional, instrumental and immediate term in the way they approach networking’. As women entrepreneurs face significant obstacles in the field, these programmes continue to play a pivotal role (Brush et al., 2006; Gupta et al., 2009).

How women navigate neoliberal capitalism and the world of business remains an important area of study (Blum and Smith, 1998), especially as gender-biased masculinist orthodoxies continue to serve as barriers to women. Masculine values and assumptions—risk-taking, competition/aggression, perseverance, stoicism—are embedded in organisational structures, cultures and practices (Collinson and Hearn, 2005). For the UK-based Women in Social Entrepreneurship (WISE) project, the research team spoke with thirty-three women about their experiences. Many highlighted how they contend with masculinist traditions and how connections with other women in women-only spaces opened up spaces for the problematising of such orthodoxies. We ask: how do these female social entrepreneurs perceive gender inequalities in the field of social entrepreneurship? In what ways does the feminine collective allow women social entrepreneurs to challenge overly masculine orthodoxies and construct themselves as a certain kind of social entrepreneur? Furthermore, what does previous feminist scholarship theorising emotional capital allow us to think critically about its formation in women’s collective spaces?

women as social entrepreneurs

In studies of women social entrepreneurs, what remains obscure and empirically unsubstantiated is why women are attracted to the social enterprise sector and how they maintain their motivation despite its masculinist nature. Some explanations suggest that social enterprises offer a more convenient work–life balance, a stronger focus on traditionally feminised sectors (education or care) and even extra opportunities to ‘do good’—all of which, it is suggested, are appealing to professional women (Eddleston and Powell, 2012). Furthermore, this relatively new business sector may also have lower entry barriers (Porter, 2008) and is less likely to be a product of social relationships shaped by gendered power (Barad, 2007; Berdahl, 2007; Braidotti, 2013). What attracts women to social entrepreneurship remains a fragmented and conflicted picture, and researchers do not fully understand the capitals (e.g., symbolic, cultural, social) they draw upon to navigate the field. We draw on a Bourdieusian notion of capitals which are produced and regulated through the logic of the field where capitals (the amount, the operationalisation) define people in certain ways (Bourdieu, 1987; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992).¹

In Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead (2013), she encourages women—primarily women of privilege—to embrace corporate culture and re-fashion it in their own self-image. However, this is no easy task. Problematising the ‘politics of optimism’ (Blum and Smith, 1988, p. 529) concerning women’s advancement in the white-collar workplace is required because traditional corporate cultures founded on masculinist notions of ‘competitiveness, autocracy and market-/profit-driven behavior’ (Nemoto, 2013, p. 157) have been documented to be hostile towards women, and women often adopt ‘male’ norms to be taken seriously (Watts, 2009). Research on the enactment of gender norms in social entrepreneurship has documented how the discourse surrounding entrepreneurship is built around the ‘male norm’, a corporate ultra-masculinity (Gupta et al., 2009), pervasive across the eco-system of social entrepreneurship. This suggests that certain abilities and resources closely aligned with masculine forms of leadership are deemed valuable within the field of social entrepreneurship. In contrast, the female entrepreneur is often cast as ‘maternal, caring-giving, nurturing, and struggling to balance work and domestic responsibilities’ (Orser, Elliott and Leck 2011, p. 561). Helene Ahl (2004, 2006) demonstrates the ways that entrepreneurship emerges and is reproduced as an intrinsically gendered space. In a series of later contributions, Ahl and her colleagues systematically reviewed the existing scholarship on gender and entrepreneurship, describing it as operating under some implicit but problematic assumptions, such as an understanding of entrepreneurship as fundamentally good, an essentialist view of gender and a view of public and private as two separate—and gendered—spheres (Henry, Foss and Ahl, 2015; see also Scott et al., 2012).

Applying a Foucauldian framework to the study of gender and entrepreneurship, Attila Bruni, Silvia Gherardi and Barbara Poggio (2004a, 2004b, 2005) theorise gender and entrepreneurship as situated performances at the intersection between bodies, discourses and practices. Using Foucault allows them to unpack the ways in which people construct themselves and each other into ‘men’ and ‘women’, and they contend that this phenomenon has given rise to an androcentric ‘entrepreneur mentality’ which reduces the space for the negotiation of alternative forms of entrepreneurship and less masculinist entrepreneurial identities (ibid.). More recently, scholars have noted how entrepreneurs construct each other in gendered ways (Wilson and Tagg, 2012), considering the differences and divisions between women business owners who perceive entrepreneurship as gender neutral and those who seek to reclaim the label of woman entrepreneur (Lewis, 2006). This involves ‘un-gender-ing’ the definitions of performance and success in relation to masculinist orthodoxies and developing ways to combat the gender gap in entrepreneurial activity (Hechavarría et al., 2018). There even appears to be an interest in the ‘mumpreneur’, who is portrayed as establishing ‘her own business from the kitchen table whilst her children crawl beneath it’ (Littler, 2018, p. 179).

Socially constructed gender stereotypes are furthered by both men and women (Paechter, 2003), which—in the case of social entrepreneurship—can substantially influence practice (Gupta et al., 2009). Recent research from the field of social psychology shows, for example, that in most industries, perceived gender biases in the evaluation of creativity negatively affect women’s work experiences and their chances of success (Haddon and Burnard, 2015). Women entrepreneurs face considerable constraints to participation in business associations, chambers and incubation/acceleration programmes (Weiler and Bernaske, 2001; Berdahl, 2007; Patton, 2013; Burnard and Stahl, 2021). Furthermore, gender bias can be a real obstacle to women social entrepreneurs raising funds from angel investors (Bischof, 2017). As a result, women tend to rely on more informal networks of acquaintances to access the knowledge, resources and opportunities they need (ibid.; Doh and Zolnik, 2011). Recent research suggests that within social entrepreneurship there is an increase in leadership niches for women, which allows them to distance themselves from subsidiary roles in male-dominated organisations and lead mixed teams or form single-sex or women-led groups (Haddon and Burnard, 2015).

As pre-existing gender-based narratives influence women’s motivations for participating in business organisations (as well as the ways they are recruited, access power or are promoted), the research presented in this article explores the perceptions and experiences of thirty-three women in relation to women-only networks. The research focus is on how women-only networks contribute to problematising masculine notions of entrepreneurship. In Carrie Paechter’s (2003, p. 71) work on collective gendered spaces, ‘power/knowledge is bound up with masculinity and femininity; different knowledge forms are seen as masculine and feminine and used differentially in gendered power relations’. Drawing on Judith Butler’s (1988, 2004) work, Paechter (2003, p. 69) calls attention to how performances of femininities change and overlap depending on specific social contexts—this is referred to as localised communities of practice. Women-only networks function as localised communities of practice where specific performances of femininities are mediated by members.

In the study, the words of the participants highlight how female experiences of social entrepreneurship, and the affective bonds fostered in the women-only networks established in the incubator, offer something to women beyond gender parity in social entrepreneurship. The data suggest that connections to other women contribute to problematising capitalist and masculine orthodoxies, providing a collective space to reflect on their gendered experiences and performances in the field of social entrepreneurship. The next section explicates some revisionist work on Pierre Bourdieu’s scholarship, specifically in the area of emotional capital, which will serve as the primary foundation to the analysis. To be clear, we primarily use emotional capital as a conceptual framework to capture how these women experience women-only collectives. This aligns closely with Bourdieu’s challenge to draw upon his concepts and work across theory and method to interrogate data (see Reay, 2004a) and his focus on dissolving distinctions between theory and research (see Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). Echoing a Bourdieusian prerogative regarding the nature of sociological knowledge never being beholden to theory, which has been taken up by contemporary revisionists (Stahl, Burnard and Perkins, 2017), we also see in our data that, depending on one’s approach of emotional capital, it manifests in these networks where it can be accumulated, consumed and possibly transferred beyond women-only networks.

theorising emotional capital in women-only networks

Feminists have both drawn upon and heavily critiqued Bourdieu and his views on gender. Lisa Adkins (2004) and Lois McNay (2004) —amongst others—have mobilised Bourdieu’s theories to think through key debates in feminism and how the gendered dynamics of various fields emphasise gender as relational and informed by context. To understand the experiences of women in a social entrepreneurship incubator programme, our analysis draws on the Bourdieusian-revisionist approach of emotional capital (Nowotny, 1981; Reay, 2000, 2004b; Cottingham, 2016, 2022). Accepting that there are different approaches to emotional capital, we are interested in what these approaches offer as a heuristic to understand women’s experiences with women-only networks. These women-only networks are affective spaces where women feel inspired and bolstered to question the normative.

Helga Nowotny (1981) first introduced the concept of ‘emotional capital’—as a variant of social capital—to address the bounds of affective familial relationships. She contends that emotional capital is a private resource that women have in greater abundance than men. Emotional capital, for Nowotny (ibid.), is collectively realised through relationships. Expanding the concept of emotional capital as a heuristic tool, Diane Reay (2000, 2004b) furthered Nowotny’s contribution to probe mothers’ emotional engagement with their children’s education and how emotional capital, as a ‘stock of emotional resources’ (Reay, 2004b, p. 61), is passed from mother to child. Reay (2000) emphasises the cost of emotional capital in terms of interpersonal relationships and personal wellbeing. Reay (2004b, p. 69) draws attention to the fact that emotional capital is class-based, noting that the working-class mothers in her study struggled to provide their children with the benefits of emotional capital where ‘[e]conomic security and high social status enhance individuals’ sense of emotional wellbeing while poverty is not an environment in which emotional capital can normally thrive’.

In more recent research, Marci D. Cottingham (2016) focused on emotional capital in the workplace, specifically with male nurses. Where Nowotny and Reay focus on women’s work in the domestic sphere, Cottingham (ibid., p. 466) suggests that it is formal employment which brings to the fore ‘aspects of emotional capital [that] are more rigidly fixed within the habitus during primary socialisation versus those susceptible to change through secondary socialisation’. Cottingham downplays emotional capital as exclusively feminine, instead making an argument that it is gender neutral, and guards against conflating emotional capital with emotional experience. Using emotional capital to investigate empirical data, Cottingham outlines the limits of the conceptual tool, specifically: i) contradictions in the conception of emotional capital in relation to gender; ii) the use of emotional capital interchangeably with management and experience; and iii) failure to distinguish primary from secondary capital resources. Cottingham’s (ibid., p. 467) work resonates with the study in how workplace experiences—as a form of secondary socialisation—assist with developing a reflexivity around emotional capital, creating a ‘triadic relationship among reason, gender, and emotion’. As Cottingham (ibid.) states, ‘self-reflexivity and practical experiences can be a source of developing emotional capital’.

There is no consistent approach to what emotional capital is and how it should be operationalised in reference to data; however, there are commonalities in regard to an emphasis on mutual support, care and trust. In this article, we focus on how emotional capital can lend itself to working with data (see Reay, 2004a) where it is both a heuristic and what is being studied. The data suggest that emotional capital is fostered in these collective networks. The implication here for the fostering of emotional capital in women-only networks is what it means for gender identities. While acknowledging previous scholarship on emotional capital, our analysis also builds upon Paechter’s (2003, p. 71) work on communities of practice, where individuals learn ‘what it is to be male and female within particular communities (including more marginal communities which do not necessarily conform to stereotypes of compulsory heterosexuality or hegemonic masculinity)’. In investigating what value the women social entrepreneurs gain from each other, we aim to draw on different interpretations of emotional capital to explore how femininities are performed within communities of practice (ibid.), and how it may contribute to our understandings of the formation and maintenance of gendered expectations within the field of social entrepreneurship. The research methodology is described in the following section.

the study and methods

The WISE Research Project, an exploratory scoping study, focused primarily on a social venture initiative hosted at a university which included both men and women entrepreneurs (Burnard, Stahl and Guigni, 2019). Like most incubators, this was designed to foster start-ups with a strong social mission and one of the goals of the initiative was to develop networks. This article does not explore the formal curriculum of the incubator programme but instead draws on different approaches to emotional capital to better understand the identity work in women-only networks where women connected and valued one another as professionals. The experience of meeting other women in the incubator was an affective experience and contributed significantly to the participants’ aspirations and advancement. These were safe spaces where they could be heard, validated and respected; furthermore, these networks may have had their genesis in an incubator programme, but they often went beyond.

The research was undertaken with funding from Cambridge University. Ethical approval was granted by the university and the research adopted the Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research (British Educational Research Association, 2018). While the primary focus was on participants attending the social incubator, eventually the scope was expanded to include a broader diversity of voices. Overall, the team interviewed a total of thirty-three participants: twenty-five involved in the main incubator and an additional eight recruited using convenience sampling from similar programmes. We encountered challenges in recruitment, as we found the female participants affiliated with these programmes to be incredibly busy. In recruiting the participants, the research team considered the following selection criteria: (i) having shared a working space with other women-led or women-only social start-up teams; or (ii) having shared experiences with university-based incubators and accelerators; and (iii) coming from a range of industries and career backgrounds. While we did not record data regarding social class and ethnicity, all participants had university degree qualifications and the resources to pay for various acceleration programmes and the majority of the participants were white. The total number of participants offered a sufficient quantity to see patterns develop, allowing generalisations across this population through three stages of grounded theoretical analysis. The design of the questions for the semi-structured interview schedule was based on the major topics arising from the literature, such as: self-description as a start-up founder; description of one’s own motivation strategies / skills / entrepreneurship creativity; strategies for handling challenges and conditions that act as enablers; and gendered practices and behaviours.

The analysis presented in this article draws from the entire data set. An additional aspect of the research process was that some participants engaged in a two-hour workshop where they interacted with arts-based activities as a catalyst for reflecting on certain questions. These activities included critical incident charting and visualising initiated by talk-and-draw, metaphoric object choice and assemblage tasks, though the data generated are not the focus of this article. These women initially worked alone and were then invited to discuss how they articulated and critically viewed themselves as women social entrepreneurs.

Throughout the analysis, the research team used personal judgement couched in the descriptive as opposed to the normative dimension. Confidentiality and anonymity were applied, and the team was mindful of the significant digital footprint which exists linking the researchers to institutions and contexts. The assignation of pseudonyms ensured that there was no further risk of making the context identifiable.

findings

What inspired most of the women participating in the WISE Research Project to pursue social entrepreneurship was dissatisfaction with the overly masculine corporate experience (e.g., what David L. Collinson and Jeff Hearn [2005, p. 296] describe as ‘authoritarianism, careerism, paternalism, and entrepreneurialism’), which they found unappealing and problematic. The majority spoke of deriving satisfaction from the autonomy of running a start-up away from the masculinist orthodoxies of corporate culture. Furthermore, many participants were driven by wanting to create a better world for future generations.

changing a culture, changing a world

Bree saw owning her own business as about not only fostering her independence but also breaking down gendered barriers:

I always wanted to and knew that I would own my own business. I always knew that I wanted to change the world. I knew I could put my ambition, skills and resources uniquely to work, to fuel a profile that would smash gender bias with the normative masculinity of the business world.

In their research on women in social entrepreneurship, Bruni, Gherardi and Poggio (2004b, 2005) note that there can be a narrowing of spaces for the development of alternative forms of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial identities. Terry spoke about the limitations of measures of success:

Our measure of success is a male measure of success, it’s about money and power, you know the FC100 thing. No sane person wants to work at the head of one of those companies because you have to kill yourself to do it, a form of madness effectively, and yet that’s a measure we continually use to measure female success. Whereas I think most women … are not so financially driven and perhaps that’s a luxury of not necessarily having always had to be historically the wage earner, is that there is room not to be driven by the financial side of it and to be able to consider doing something for meaning or for change or for a different value set of wanting things to be better for the next generation or whatever. That is, is that somewhere there is room inside people’s heads to consider using business for good and for change and not just making the most amount of money from exploiting people that they can.

Terry spoke of her practices as a social entrepreneur as ‘something for meaning’ or ‘for change’, stemming from what she described as a ‘different value set’ from her male counterparts. While she still sought to work in business, and draw on business principles, she valued the way she could think outside the normative concept of profit-driven practices. Other participants spoke of the ‘linear’ business processes of men—a corporate logic—compared with the more diverse processes that women might take to allow for the emergence of alternative possibilities. They expressed a discomfort with a ‘Silicon Valley’ culture of entrepreneurship which they perceived as reductionist. Highlighting emotion management and capacities to feel, many of the participants found the corporate world overbearingly masculine (the ‘old boys’ club’) and financially driven often at the expense of personal wellbeing. However, whilst they acknowledged gender bias, there remained uncertainty and awkwardness around how to navigate these masculinist orthodoxies. In the example below, Pippa described her experience of being an invited speaker at a seminar:

I went to like a seminar and I was speaking and there were like 330 guys and me, and that was in the beginning. I was just about to speak and this guy says, ‘Oh, make us a cup of tea love, hah hah hah’. And I, oh the younger ones I would have told them to F off, and I’m too old and polite, but somebody else said, ‘I don’t think those kinds of comments are necessary’. Um … it sort of sums up the prejudice in the industry, and in some ways it takes away from, they never even heard what I had to say, they had already made their minds up, you know, that this was not my role to be at the front telling them things. And … um … I do find it difficult at times.

Pippa highlighted the ‘prejudice in the industry’ and how this influenced her sense of self and her desire to gain credibility. She expresses a frustration on being ignored: ‘they never even heard what I had to say, they had already made their minds up’. Yet, even in a situation where there is a balance of men and women within a social entrepreneurship environment, the women interviewed were acutely aware of the gender differences in how men and women present themselves within the field of social entrepreneurship. According to Terry:

It’s not that women ask different questions. I think, those trainings were very much, were safe spaces for sure, but different from what I usually experience in women-only spaces. The incubator people, they were very conscious of talking about fuck-ups, failures, and that very much helps everyone, maybe especially men, sort of let go and share things, and [the] sharing aspect is what makes it a safe space.

It was clear that these women—as founders carving their own way in social entrepreneurship—desired a collective space where they could embody a persona they considered to be natural. This aligns closely with Reay’s (2004, 2005) interpretation of emotional capital (e.g., confidence, security) as strengthened collectively. Furthermore, there also are echoes here of Cottingham’s (2016) arguments regarding the importance of self-reflexivity in developing emotional capital. Aside from women-only spaces, Terry spoke of the importance of a safe space—a space of vulnerability—where she would have the freedom to discuss failures. Engaged in the women-only spaces within the incubator, the participants gained insights into how to grow their business, but also how to develop themselves as specifically female social entrepreneurs. The women began to symbiotically engage with each other during their time at the social venture (and beyond) where they developed spaces for sharing their frustrations and discussing practical strategies for breaking down gendered barriers.

gaining confidence through collective trust

These spaces were integral to how their emotional capital was collectively realised; for many of the women, it was the experience of feeling ‘respected’ for their social enterprise ideas which was integral to how they critiqued masculine orthodoxies. Feeling respected, it would appear, fostered emotional capital—the ‘emotional assets of confidence, security and entitlement’ (Reay, 2005, p. 923)—which may or may not be transferrable. We see here Cottingham’s (2016, p. 466) point about emotional resources in formal employment settings becoming ‘embodied and activated through emotional experience’. This is apparent with Jill, who, when reflecting on her involvement in women-only networks established in the incubator, stated:

I think one of the main keystones for me was respect, because I felt respected [by women] … I had come in with this social venture that I had been running for a couple of years on my own … and there are these people saying, ‘No, that’s a great idea and you and do this and do that, and there are all these options available for you, and you can get funding’. So, I think the biggest impact for me was taking myself seriously, because they were taking me seriously.

This opens another aspect of emotional capital, as fostering confidence; here, such a confidence is reified through validation, and the collective experience of being respected increases emotional capital as a ‘stock of emotional resources’ (Reay, 2004b, p. 61). In considering the value of joining the feminine collective in the incubator, many spoke about their feelings of long-term isolation prior to this opportunity. Ariadne described how women can become isolated in the industry: ‘There are some amazing women but generally it is the same story, I have seen some women being very isolated in the industry, because of the hierarchy and because of their skills not being celebrated enough’.

The participants’ stories reveal how collective feminine spaces in the incubator built trust, confidence and cohesion. This is similar to Nowotny’s (1981) conception of emotional capital as formed collectively and carrying a familial level of closeness and solidarity, though clearly not tied to the domestic familial sphere. For example, Terry spoke of the importance of having female connections fostered by the social venture initiative as integral to her perception of a ‘safe’ space:

… having the social ventures thing be dominated by women made it a very safe and inclusive place to be able to talk, to feel free about having opinions, to not be intimidated, to not feel like your voice wasn’t going to matter in the room because there might be more intelligent more experienced people there. … It made it a very safe place to have a voice and to feel that there was room to be a woman in business in the social venture sphere …

Terry explained how ‘bonding with other women entrepreneurs, knowing what people are going through … just the support … there was incredible female support there’. Terry’s experiences highlight how emotional capital is collectively realised. Her words align with Cottingham’s (2016, p. 466) approach to theorising emotional capital, which emphasises that it ‘can be developed over the course of occupational experiences and is a vital concept for understanding emotion’s role in social practice’, drawing attention to the ‘tension between primary emotional capital (perceived as “innate”) and secondary emotional capital developed on the job’. Arguably, how these women develop emotional capital could be closely aligned with female gender norms inculcated in their primary socialisation which are, in women-only networks, allowed the opportunity to come to the fore. This analysis complements previous research which highlights how women social entrepreneurs have a desire to reclaim what it means to be a woman entrepreneur (see Lewis, 2006; Wilson and Tagg, 2012).

Arguably, female collective spaces serve as a stimulus to engage with alternative forms of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial identities separate from the masculine normative. Collectively, the women perform particular femininities through exposure, experience and engagement with these communities of practice (Paechter, 2003). Jill reflected on the role of gender in the women-only network and also in her wider business practices:

… I do build up bonds better with women, I think, um, in this space. I’ve got some, obviously, good male friends as well. For example, my main supplier is run by a woman, and actually, my second new supplier is now run by a woman as well … I definitely would say that I am part of a network of women social entrepreneurs, um, and I am consciously trying to build that up, not because they are women, but because we have a lot in common and it tends to be that they are women.

As social enterprise remains significantly shaped by inequality (Henry, Foss and Ahl, 2015), the data suggest that women social entrepreneurs desire both gender-specific spaces but also safe, positive, mixed-gender spaces focused on acquiring skills and growing as a social entrepreneur. Terry, for example, reflected on how the gender mix enabled her to see how women can establish themselves in a male business domain:

What I found so helpful is seeing women holding their own in those environments and not being intimidated and being able to operate and function and to being examples of how to do that. Because essentially when the entrepreneurs get out there, they are going to have to function in a still male-dominated environment largely and it’s that modelling of how lots of women can do it and manage to do it and manage to be in the teaching side of things and teaching men in a business arena is actually also massively important …

Terry emphasised the capabilities and expertise of women in social entrepreneurship. By ‘holding their own’, it can be assumed that Terry meant both resisting pressures to adopt capitalist and masculine orthodoxies and pushing back against subtle and overt forms of prejudice and bias, as highlighted by Pippa and Jill. Studies of social entrepreneurialism have focused on how individuals adopt dispositions towards masculinist notions of leadership and success (Bruni, Gherardi and Poggio, 2005; Lewis, 2006; Phillips et al., 2015). Bruni, Gherardi and Poggio (2004b, 2005) contend that few studies have addressed the androcentric ‘entrepreneur mentality’ which narrows the space for the negotiation of alternative forms of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial identities.

‘men report and women rapport’

Consistent in the data was participants emphasising how certain gendered performances, aligned closely with masculine orthodoxies, were present in the field of social entrepreneurship. This is important to note when considering what women-only spaces had to offer in terms of fostering emotional capital. Addressing how gender identity works within a community of practice, Paechter (2003, p. 74) asserts that ‘it becomes not sufficient to claim a particular identity; that identity has to be recognised by group members, which in turn reflects back on one’s understanding of oneself’. According to Pippa:

Women have a very different approach to getting things done, or at least maybe I do, but I’ve seen it with other things. Men report and women rapport. For example, I had a big meeting with a very important company and they brought two of their key people plus an advisor and I was on the other side at the desk with the same business advisor and a supplier, and I said to them, look I know you’re very busy so why don’t we go and see the trailer or if you like I can do a short presentation and then we can see the trailer. And this guy looked at his colleague and he said, ‘Oh, let’s just tell you about us first’. And he spent three quarters of an hour talking about themselves and what they’ve [done] [laughter], before we even started talking about the trailer, you know.

Bruni, Gherardi and Poggio (2004a, 2005) conceptualise gender and entrepreneurship as ‘situated performances’ at the intersection between bodies, discourses and practices. In their study of women in tech, Ozkazanc-Pan and Clark Muntean (2018, p. 386) highlight how female networks ‘reflect relationship building rather than [a] transactional approach’. In thinking about the way in which people construct themselves and each other as ‘men’ and ‘women’, Pippa considered a ‘gendering of entrepreneurship’ and ‘enterprising of gender’ where she saw her performance as gendered, in line with her perception of the differences between how men and women conduct business (e.g., ‘report’ versus ‘rapport’).

Feminine traits of care and supportiveness are visible in both Pippa and Terry’s comments. Considering the internalisations of gendered experiences, some of the participants spoke of childhood experiences which had had a profound effect on what motivated them to become entrepreneurs. Like other work on women in entrepreneurship (BarNir, Watson and Hutchins, 2011; Austin and Nauta, 2016), many participants highlighted being inspired by a female figure who had succeeded against the odds. Donna described her journey to develop her own self-determination to trump what she perceived as internalised gender bias:

I think the challenge comes internally and externally. So, I have been doing work on myself which is to overcome my own internal gender bias, which is born about from a strong father who had set me up as a mother and wife from when I was twelve … and that is really embedded in my psyche and has taken a lot of work; my mother thought it was unseemly for women to work and would not give up work and was a very powerful woman. But so she was conflicted with what society expected her to do and what she wanted to do, and she did what she wanted to do, but she didn’t do it without any sort of peace I think is probably the case. Um, so I think internally I have to avoid being what I perceive to be a good woman, and how that might help me get along the course by listening to men or massaging their egos, and I find that in my psyche that is what I have to do. I have to do a lot of work to build my own identity as a woman and it’s fine—there’s an intellectual level that says of course it’s fine, but in reality there are occasions when it is not easy to overcome that old story that lives inside of you.

Donna was reflexive and working to overcome her ‘internal gender bias’, which was ‘really embedded in my psyche’ where it ‘lives inside’ her. Here we draw attention to Cottingham’s (2016, p. 467) argument how ‘self-reflexivity’ is integral to the formation of emotional capital. Furthermore, Donna was aware of internalised gender bias but also the conflicted feelings experienced by her mother around women and employment. Her words suggest that progression in social enterprise is largely dependent on strategies to reconcile this internal bias. Similar to other research (see Henry, Foss and Ahl, 2015), Donna positioned professional advancement as her individual responsibility (‘I have to do a lot of work to build my own identity as a woman’), not fully acknowledging the clear structural disadvantages or how she may require support.

In reflecting on the women-only network in the incubator, Pippa highlighted the importance of intergenerational connections and the transfer of expertise through mentoring a new generation:

I am in a cohort of women who are in their sixties and beyond. Part of what we are trying to do is to create responses to the young women in the network who want to see role models, want to learn from what we have done, what we have experiences of, what has worked, what has not worked. So, it is about cross-fertilising over the generations.

Pippa’s words suggest that for women social entrepreneurs it is not only about affective relationships—which foster emotional capital—but also about the inspiration coming from surrounding themselves with women who have similar values regarding social entrepreneurship. Pippa highlighted that learning from one another is a central aspect of these female professional networks—or what Paechter (2003) calls ‘femininities as communities of practice’—which reaffirms David Knoke’s (2009) arguments concerning ‘normative principles’ around shared values in structuring professional conduct and the importance of trust. In this case, such normative principles are aligned with the feminine traits of mutual support, care and trust which, according to Nowotny and Reay, are important dimensions of emotional capital. In reference to our data, we see emotional capital as fostered collectively through women-only networks where, we assume, it carries a certain purchase as women move back into the male-dominated field of social entrepreneurship when the incubator concludes. While these women-only networks are affective spaces—where women feel inspired to question the normative—we do not know the extent to which they are successful in breaking down these embedded masculine orthodoxies.

discussion

The research addresses the perceptions of women as they participate with, lead and work with other women in social start-ups. Drawing on theories of emotional capital to explore all-female localised communities of practice, we glimpse how these professional networks open up spaces for women to discuss gender politics, dynamics and relations and allow them to think about the ways they come to ‘understand [their] own power’ (Donna). The women’s experiences with the feminine collectives explored in our study, where cooperative bonds are formed thus fostering emotional capital, allowed for a critique of particular gendered performances (e.g., ‘men report and women rapport’). The data suggest that the majority of the women we spoke with found these spaces beneficial in bolstering their comfortability of performing their feminine identities (Burnard, Stahl and Guigni, 2019), as many were already beginning to question the pressure to adopt masculinist orthodoxies to advance their careers (Gupta et al., 2009; Watts, 2009). If interaction with women-only spaces were to become more frequent beyond the conclusion of the incubator, the data suggest that the participants would be well-positioned to resist a mainstream masculinist corporate culture.

In reflecting on the experiences of these women in relation to collective all-female communities of practice, it is important to draw attention to the genesis of emotional capital which was first developed to explore women’s experiences of adverse circumstances (Nowotny, 1981). While we do not discount that the women in our study experienced adverse conditions, the role of emotional capital—as mutual support, care and trust—appeared to be fostered and transferred through supportive networks.

Given that we were focused on women social entrepreneurs and their working lives, it is perhaps unsurprising that the data chimed more with previous theorisations regarding the collective and experiential nature of emotional capital. While the work of Nowotny (ibid.) and Reay (2000) assists us to think critically about how emotional capital is intertwined with the logic of the field where it is accrued and valued, it is important to foreground how emotional capital is not necessarily tied solely to family life (Nowotny, 1981); instead, emotional capital may be valued and actively cultivated by women as a facet of professional life, especially within the caring professions (see Cottingham, 2016, 2022). In drawing on emotional capital, we see that women-only collective spaces do appear ‘profitable’ for these women, though how profitable it is when they leave these networks and re-engage with the masculine orthodoxies of social entrepreneurship is a developing picture. While Reay (2000) asserts that emotional capital for mothers has a cost in terms of interpersonal relationships and personal wellbeing, our operationalisation of emotional capital aligns more with how emotional capital is valued, accrued and embodied and functions as a positive influence on the interpersonal relationships and personal wellbeing of these women (often in reference to mentorship). This echoes the work of Ozkazanc-Pan and Clark Muntean (2018, p. 387), who note that ‘Successful female entrepreneurs stress the importance of relationship building, of giving back by connecting other women to resources rather than necessarily accruing social capital to “spend” later’. We acknowledge here that while Reay (2004b) focused on working-class mothers, our cohort are largely privileged women within an exclusive space, which limits our understanding of class-based variations of emotional capital.

Thus, in some ways, the study serves as the inverse of Cottingham’s (2016) research on male nurses where she highlights how men are not seen as naturally caring and contends that compassion and empathy are actions they come to embody through workplace practices. In contrast, the women social entrepreneurs in this project discussed being characterised as too caring for the masculinist ‘Silicon Valley’ culture of entrepreneurship; this seemed to serve as an impetus to carve out spaces where their emotional capital would be both valued and fostered. Here, it is important to note that Cottingham (ibid., p. 466) does not see emotional capital as accrued (in a Bourdieusian sense) and instead focuses on how emotional resources become embodied through workplace socialisation. Working with theory and thinking multi-dimensionally, we have tried to keep with a Bourdieusian approach of dissolving distinctions between theory and research (see Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992; Stahl, 2016). Our research suggests that emotional capital for women entrepreneurs can be accrued and/or developed when they are in women-only spaces and that these spaces are where gendered concepts, expectations and actions (the codes) are significantly adjusted.

Drawing on emotional capital, many of the points we have made about the affective experiences of feminine collectives also reminds us of scholarship by Robert Putnam (2000, p. 22) on what he terms bonding social capital, which consists of close-knit networks that are ‘inward looking’ and ‘tend to reinforce exclusive identities and homogeneous groups’.² With this in mind, as a concluding point, while professional networks are important for the women social entrepreneurs in this study, these networks, like all professional networks, may contribute to the formation and maintenance of hierarchies and exclusionary practices. After all, all the participants had to apply to and pay for participation in incubator programmes.

conclusion

There is limited knowledge regarding the experiences of women social entrepreneurs and there exists no systematic analysis of gendered practices in the field of employment. The WISE Research Project offers some insights into how female social entrepreneurs experience women-only networks and the potential for reducing marginalisation (Burnard, Stahl and Guigni, 2019). Thinking with emotional capital offers the opportunity to consider what forms of emotional capital could be valued if the ‘male norm’ of corporate ultra-masculinity (Gupta et al., 2009) which is pervasive in the field of social entrepreneurship were disassembled. As these women navigate the barriers within the masculinist entrepreneurship ecosystem, the data suggest that they pursue and benefit from spaces where they can envision new ways of being social entrepreneurs. These spaces allow for opportunities to develop forms of capital which contribute to their success, and more importantly, for the prospect to re-define what is deemed valuable in the field of social entrepreneurship. We would argue that these are spaces of possibilities which have the potential to foster collective action to challenge the existing gender biases of social entrepreneurship and may be productive in counteracting stratification among women within the corporate field (Blum and Smith, 1988; Sandberg, 2013). Therefore, in both policy and practice, it is imperative that efforts to widen women’s participation in social innovation focus on creating spaces where women feel powerful and comfortable. Drawing on previous research from feminist scholars on emotional capital, we have addressed some of the ways in which reflexive opportunities to develop emotional capital assist in the facilitation of women’s sense of success as social entrepreneurs. Cottingham (2016, p. 467) writes that ‘self-reflexivity and practical experiences can be a source of developing emotional capital’, highlighting how experiences can call into question aspects of gendered primary socialisation. We accept that there is not one singular definition of emotional capital but a general consensus around mutual support, care and trust; to conclude, we believe that emotional capital has the most analytical purchase where it foregrounds the affective experiences of the emotional labour and complex identity work involved with performing gender expectations as well as problematising the performances themselves.

Footnotes

1

Pierre Bourdieu (in Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p. 32) warns against a ‘social division of scientific labour which splits, reifies and compartmentalises moments of the process of construction of the sociological object into separate specialties’, where he emphasises the importance of multidimensional thinking.

2

We acknowledge that bonding social capital, according to , can reinforce the practices of nepotism, ethnic hatred and sectarianism, as well as sexism.

Author Biographies

Garth Stahl (ORCID 0000-0002-1800-8495) is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at the University of Queensland. His research interests lie on the nexus of neoliberalism and socio-cultural studies of education, identity, equity/inequality and social change. Currently, his research projects and publications encompass theoretical and empirical studies of learner identities, gender and youth, sociology of schooling in a neoliberal age, gendered subjectivities, equity and difference and educational reform.

Pamela Burnard (ORCID 0000-0002-8997-0171) is a Professor of Arts, Creativities and Educations, University of Cambridge, UK. Her research interests concern investigations which advance diverse creativities research, creative learning and teaching, learning cultures, creativity assessment, digital media, diverse musical creativities, creative industries and sectorial gender issues in higher education, conservatoire and community settings.

Sarah McDonald (ORCID 0000-0002-0454-4983) is a Lecturer in Education Futures at the University of South Australia. Her doctoral research focuses on how the intersection between gender and class interacts with higher education, and how this interaction impacts upon the construction of feminine identities for young women transitioning into university. She is interested in gendered subjectivities, social mobility, social barriers and inequalities in education.

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