Entrepreneurs and state officials have transformed Bengaluru from a city where the world’s ‘backend’ tech work is sent to a new start-up hub known for its entrepreneurship and innovation. Since 2012, I have been tracking the multiple places and practices through which this “start-up city” is produced. A key site in the development of citizens as entrepreneurs is the specific focus on the development of women as entrepreneurs.

There are networking events for women entrepreneurs, special technology sessions hosted by Google, a training program at the Indian Institute of Management (Bangalore), and informal mentoring groups. Why then have so many women entrepreneurs that I have met failed to receive adequate funding or to be recognized as entrepreneurs?

Writing on the ascendancy of the “gender order of development” in the new millennium, UCLA professor Ananya Roy notes that neoliberal ideologies and austerity policies have now made way for a me liberal who sees poverty and wants to act accordingly. The figure of the abject Third World woman on the covers of brochures of non-profit organizations has been replaced by an empowered subject of global development.

This woman is enterprising and agentive. She can benefit from microfinance loans for the well-being of her community. It could also present itself attractively on the website of the global microfinance group Kiva. This emphasis on women to become entrepreneurs, create value and reduce poverty marks a feminization of politics.

Roy writes that this turning point in global development marks the “ways in which development operates through women-centered policies that serve to maintain traditional gender roles in social reproduction.” During my fieldwork in Bangalore, I witnessed how this ‘gender order of development’ also shapes the competitive entrepreneurial world of start-up capitalism. Women must become entrepreneurial even within a social order that still expects them to do housework, reproduce caste and class, and prepare families for school and work.

Male structures

This emphasis on empowering women without changing a larger social structure works in at least two ways. In the first, women were forced to compete for funding in male-dominated start-ups. For example, at a start-up festival in Bangalore, I attended a pitch session where entrepreneurs briefly described their businesses and ideas to a panel of funders.

The women stood up to present their business – a math game for kids, a human resource consultancy initiative for those looking to re-enter the workforce, a board game idea. They were greeted with lukewarm responses from the fundraising panel. “Don’t invent for a need that exists; create need and desire! we told them. Funders were looking for projects that could scale, experience huge success, and generate enough hype to create their own markets rather than respond to existing markets.

The women diligently took notes and thought about how they might reshape their business. But the problem wasn’t the idea itself; is that start-up entrepreneurship is a male space. It requires mobility through the areas of innovation, networking and leisure that constitute the world of start-ups. When funders asked questions, whether in innovation labs or pitch sessions, they wanted to know how an idea could evolve and how many hours entrepreneurs could devote to their business.

Meanwhile, women entrepreneurs have seen their days cut short on both sides. Several of them ran home before networking events in the evening to care for young children and worked irregular hours with their coworkers to accommodate the job of maintaining the heterosexual nuclear family in the classroom. medium.

When “female entrepreneurship” emerges in this context, it does not change the social structures that demand time and energy from women. He tries to integrate them into a male world that demands endless hours, mobility between entrepreneurial sites and an unlimited time commitment to grow a business. Like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, female entrepreneurship is not recognized as valuable because women are not recognized as entrepreneurial. They are viewed by donors as housewives with their main allegiance to the domestic realm.

Individual empowerment

The second way in which the general issue of ‘female entrepreneurship’ has been approached as a challenge is through dedicated training and mentoring. For example, the renowned IIM has targeted training programs for women entrepreneurs. Goldman Sachs offers a global program, delivered as an online course, to equip women with “the tools and practical knowledge to help you successfully manage the demands of growing your business.”

Here, entrepreneurs are offered the ultimate flexible training and retraining options: a key part of neoliberal economies that require us to prepare for ever-changing market conditions. Once participants have chosen their course, options are presented to them to apply their learning to their specific situations and ideas. For example, in a “Grow Your Business” module, those who sign up (it’s free) can learn to identify a good opportunity, select a growth opportunity, and note who is geographically close to them on a map. Each module allows the user to learn new concepts and apply them to their own emerging ideas.

While the competitive male-dominated world of start-up capitalism did not recognize women as entrepreneurs, the targeted efforts of all-female groups focus on individual empowerment and skills with a similar actualization of larger structures. in which women are supported in their efforts to be recognized as entrepreneurs or to be financed. The programs seek to connect women with each other and create ways for them to teach other aspiring women.

During a fieldwork in Bengaluru, I met women from an informal group of networked women who organized similar training sessions for each other. In one session, a woman taught a group how to create a spreadsheet over breakfast. In another, local women-run businesses organized a day of pop-up events in a specific neighborhood to boost consumption. Social events like parties and disco nights have doubled as networking opportunities. Everywhere it seemed that leisure and work were mingling to trivialize work and produce the female entrepreneur as an entrepreneur in all aspects of her life.

Women participating in these formal and informal programs are expected to already have the means to enter a larger world of entrepreneurship which requires time, energy and the ability to evolve. Individuals are empowered and they hold each other accountable. Michelle Murphy, professor at the University of Toronto, writes on entrepreneurship in neoliberal economies as a culture of human capital: Each of us is said to have latent potential that can be developed to produce economic value.

As long as women’s domestic work (the work of social reproduction) is not recognized and remunerated as labor, women are seen as a latent labor force that must be cultivated to produce value for the economy. What if efforts in favor of female entrepreneurship were instead redirected towards valuing existing forms of work – the work of care, kinship, social reproduction that are so deeply gendered in a way that Covid-19 has clearly explained ?

My research has found multiple ways that gendered work supports and enables the ability of some entrepreneurs to dream of world-changing innovation while others are relegated to doing the work to support and sustain it. Rather than training women to compete in this impossible economy of high valuation and burnout or confining them to all-female groups that work through the individual, we need to re-evaluate how we value different forms of work and how the do-what-you-love ethic can be achieved outside of market exchange.

The writer is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Gender, Sexuality and Feminism Studies at Middlebury College. This article is the subject of a special agreement with the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania.