ANÁLISIS CORRELACIONAL

The human capital critique that structures my analysis of the WDR 2012 highlights the relation between the ascription of certain gendered essentialisms to empowerable women and the interventions that propose to activate those essentialisms in order to shape particular subjectivities. This relationship is succinctly demonstrated by the position of entrepreneurship in the report. Women’s entrepreneurship is understood in the report as less productive and profitable than men’s entrepreneurial enterprises, in part because risk-taking behaviours are linked to gendered bodies and thus to the suitability of certain kinds of bodies and subjects for economic success. However, women’s perceived risk-averseness (represented as a product of maternal responsibility) is continually validated in contrast to male risk-taking behaviours, and women are therefore held up as ideal borrowers who are responsible and therefore ‘bankable’. The female entrepreneur features in the report as the archetypal empowerable woman, whose inborn qualities predispose her to particular forms of responsible, sustainable economic activity, although this depends on the presence of interventions to harness her potential.

The female entrepreneur45 is a recurrent subject in the report who reflects a broader trend within development discourses. The ‘entrepreneurial woman’ is a highly visible subject of global governance interventions; indeed, the promotion of women’s entrepreneurship is one of the main development policies which has survived and been “re- invigorated” in the post-GFC context (Gregoratti and Allison 2013: 2). Broadly, female entrepreneurship discourses are characterized by a paradoxical dual emphasis where, on the one hand, women are “castigated” for their failure to fulfill masculinist notions of entrepreneurship and, on the other, women’s entrepreneurship is imagined as a natural extension of women’s caregiving responsibilities (Gregoratti and Allison 2013: 7). Within the WDR 2012, female entrepreneurship is continually emphasized as a central focus of the report’s analysis, particularly in terms of increasing women’s access to markets and harnessing their dormant agency. It reflects the dual emphasis suggested by Gregoratti and Allison: on one hand, it continually measures female entrepreneurs against a standard male entrepreneur and suggests interventions to inculcate more entrepreneurial subjectivities into women, while on the other hand, the report represents women’s supposedly natural caregiving obligations as the main motivating factor for entrepreneurship.

The report’s discussion of female entrepreneurship revolves around concerns with the subjectivity itself and women’s failure to naturally conform to modes of male entrepreneurship; the relative lack of profitability of women’s entrepreneurial ventures is of central emphasis here. In the first instance, the report repeatedly stresses the difference in productivity and success between female and male entrepreneurs: Female owned enterprises “perform less well” than male-owned enterprises and they “tend to be less profitable” and they “generate lower sales” [201]; female entrepreneurs exhibit “lower productivity levels” than their male counterparts [201]; and they tend to be

45 _{The report defines an entrepreneur as such: “… the term entrepreneur refers to}

individuals who are self-employed with no employees (own-account workers) and with employees (employers)” [39, 240].

concentrated in less profitable “‘female’ occupations and sectors” [16, 208]. Despite the differences in productivity, however, the report repeatedly stresses that women are “not worse” entrepreneurs than men, but that they have less access to productive inputs and human capital [198, 203, 204]. Furthermore, the discussion of differences in entrepreneurship centers around a consideration of differences in male and female entrepreneurial subjectivities; in other words, to what extent do women possess the requisite entrepreneurial skills and mentalities?

The figure of the woman entrepreneur and the obstacles to her economic success draw on two tropes that run throughout the report: firstly, that a lack of access to financial institutions or productive inputs hinder productivity and prevent the realization of women’s full economic capacities (see Section 5.4). The report makes a few mentions of external obstacles like lack of access to credit [228, 302], information communication technology [263], and land resources [229] that hinder women entrepreneurs. Women’s enterprises are more likely to be concentrated in “’female’ occupations and sectors” where they own businesses that conform to female roles, like beauty parlors, food vending, and sewing [208, 16]. The report attributes the smaller size, lower profits, and lower survival probabilities among female-owned businesses to women’s perceptions of their own abilities or harmful social norms that undermine women’s “self-efficacy and potential” [204].

Secondly, it claims that women generally lack the appropriate mentalities for entrepreneurship, as their self-perception, self-efficacy, and confidence diminish their opportunities [204, 207, 181]. Although it repeatedly stresses the socially ingrained nature of harmful gender norms [8, 171, 173], the report nevertheless makes numerous mentions of the deficiencies of women’s entrepreneurial subjectivities and the interventions required to correct this. Initiatives to overcome the structural obstacles to women entrepreneurs (land, credit, etc.) are frequently accompanied by “business training, social networking, and group activities to educate and empower them” [238]; in order for women entrepreneurs to succeed in gendered business networks, they

require finance, business, and firm management training [203, 233, 302, 342].

Prevailing narratives position the ideal and normative entrepreneur as male, thereby allowing women to gain legitimacy within this discourse only to the extent that they can adopt and reproduce male attitudes and behaviours. Women are accordingly constructed as potential but deficient entrepreneurs in need of business advice, training and support to give them the necessary attitudes and skills (Ahl and Marlow 2012: 546). Male entrepreneurship occupies a dominant and disciplinary role in which men are persistently positioned as the referent object of entrepreneurship and business-oriented subjectivities. Women, the report suggests, are not naturally predisposed to entrepreneurship and it is instead largely a product of their intimate attachment to family and their reproductive obligations.

Female entrepreneurs are also more likely than their male counterparts to be ‘necessity’ entrepreneurs (to view entrepreneurship as a choice of last resort) and less likely to be ‘opportunity’ entrepreneurs. In the United States, women are underrepresented among high-growth firms, where growth orientation is measured by whether the entrepreneur was pushed or pulled into entrepreneurship. In developing countries, women often cite the need to supplement household income as the main reason to enter entrepreneurship, whereas men cite the desire to exploit market opportunities [207, emphasis my own].

This construction firstly reinforces the notion that women are marginal to markets and enter reluctantly, even employing the imagery of entrepreneurs as either “pushed or pulled” – either by economic necessity or in pursuit of economic opportunity. The discussion of entrepreneurship here serves to reproduce gender binaries and consign female subjectivities to the domestic realm. By contrast, men’s subjectivities are positively associated with savvy financial risk taking and eagerness to “exploit” market opportunities. Male bodies and

subjectivities again represent the unquestioned norm to which female entrepreneurs can aspire and mold themselves (Ahl and Marlow 2012: 545). Given the report’s contention that women’s empowerment and increased agency allow women to “take advantage of economic opportunities” [151], the risk-taking, opportunity-seizing male entrepreneurial subjectivity described here seems to represent an ideal type to which women should aspire. Entrepreneurship discourses in the report, and the continual focus on empowering women to function as productive and profitable entrepreneurs, highlights the paradoxical emphasis on women as irrational, marginal, and family-oriented actors while promoting a range of mechanisms to instill market rationality and transform their subjectivities.

Gender and Risk

The deeply gendered notion of risk in the report further evidences the unproblematized association between male bodies, subjectivities, and successful entrepreneurship on the one hand, and female bodies, reproduction, and altruistic behaviour on the other. Risk occupies a complex and contradictory role in the report, in part because risk is differently conceptualized between chapters dealing with different kinds of risk taking, whether health risks or financial risks. Risk is mapped onto male and female bodies as follows: agential and entrepreneurial (profitable) risk-taking aligns with hegemonic masculinities, while risk- averseness and passivity are associated with femininity and maternal obligation.

This contradictory narrative is present in the WDR 2012, wherein women are represented as intrinsically risk averse, less naturally entrepreneurial, and yet more financially prudent and therefore a safer investment. As discussed above, the report differently positions men and women in relation to the market, entrepreneurial, and risk-taking behaviours in terms of factors that “push” and “pull” them into the market [207]. Women are therefore represented as reluctant entrepreneurs who enter the market in order to fulfill obligations to the family, wherein their productivity is understood as a result of reproductive responsibilities.

While women’s entrepreneurship is understood as a manifestation of their natural affinity to care work, men’s entrepreneurship is instead positioned as a product of entrepreneurial, risk-taking nature. Furthermore, this language imagines men as better able to compete in the market environment, detect market opportunities, and capitalize on those opportunities. Gender difference is therefore manifested in terms of entrepreneurship and affinity to market behaviours. Although the report tentatively concludes that women “are not worse” farmers or entrepreneurs than men but that they face different constraints [198, 203], it hedges and concludes by saying that the evidence is mixed [204]. In this discussion, however, it suggests that the poor performance of women-owned enterprises might be explained by gender differences in attitude:

Some authors argue, however, that gender differences in management and business performance reflect differences in women’s and men’s attitudes toward risk and competition, as well as toward personnel management and business organization—where these differences could be innate or learned [204].

Thus while the report creates some conceptual space for a social constructivist account of gender and entrepreneurial behaviour, it nonetheless accepts the alignment of female bodies, feminine nature, risk-averseness, reproductive obligations, and general lack of market mentality. Early in the report gender inequality and gender differences are elaborated in similar terms:

A substantial body of research documents such male-female differences in risk aversion, social preferences, and attitudes about competition. It follows that if men and women differ, on average, in attitudes, preferences, and choices, then not all observed differences in outcomes can be attributed to differences in opportunities [3].

Risk averseness is repeatedly ascribed to women, in contrast to men’s risk-taking behaviours. Given the report’s tendency to understand women’s entrepreneurship as a manifestation of feminine reproductivity and family obligation, this risk-averseness is generally looked upon favorably, particularly considering the broader narrative of women and girls as a safe investment. Women may lack the natural entrepreneurship inherent in men, in this discourse, but their risk- averseness in part contributes to their status as figures of global financial stability and the oft-cited claims about women’s ability to help “mitigate the effects of current and future financial crises” (World Bank 2014a; see Prugl 2012; Elias 2013; Griffin 2013). Moreover, men’s risk- taking behaviour occupies an ambiguous place in the report.

Risk, a deeply gendered concept, appears throughout the report in various manifestations and is employed to support several, sometimes contradictory, narratives.46 Risk alternately stands in for successful entrepreneurship and men’s willingness to take on business risks connotes their suitability for market work and entrepreneurship; conversely, men’s association with risky sexual and health behaviours signals their vulnerability and unsuitability to stand in as subject of empowerment (see Section 4.5). Furthermore, notions of entrepreneurial and profit-pursuing risk are distinct from perceptions of creditworthiness, where male bodies are associated with profit-seeking risk and female bodies (and subjectivities) with creditworthiness, low- risk borrowing, and docility (Moodie 2013: 282; see also Karim 2008; Chakravarti 2008). Women’s risk-averseness at times signals their externality to markets and the importance of inculcating market mentalities into women to enable them to thrive in productive, market work. Alternately, women’s risk-averseness connotes their reliability, responsibility, and family-oriented nature which contributes to their representation as central to the future of global finance and poverty eradication. Risk occupies multiple contradictory positions in the report, always aligned with gender and notions of entrepreneurship or empowerability. Empowerability is therefore ascribed to women whose

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(supposedly intrinsic) maternal nature can be transformed into a particular of empowered entrepreneurship.