Changing Places Through Women’s Entrepreneurship

In this article, I focus on entrepreneurship as a gendered geographic process to examine how changes in people and place are linked. Although entrepreneurship is a process that is marked by deep stereotypical gender divisions, it is also one through which people can change the meaning of gender and the way in which gender is lived. In addition, entrepreneurship links people and place in a number of ways, most notably through networks of social relations in place. I discuss four geographic studies of women’s entrepreneurship, each undertaken in a different country—Botswana, India, Peru, and the United States. These studies demonstrate that whereas entrepreneurship per se or access to microcredit alone is seldom sufficient to change the position of women or gender relations in a place, women are using entrepreneurship to change their lives and those of others and, in the process, are changing the places where they live. Key to this transformative process are programs of governmental and nongovernmental organizations and women’s grassroots actions that are aimed at building women’s skills, confidence, and business networks.