3.4 Why are women entrepreneurs so important?

Creating gender equality in the workplace, and more specifically business, is a pressing global challenge.

Back in Week 1, the OECD video ‘The power of four billion’ made a compelling case that ‘the laws, attitudes and practices discriminating against them represent a huge cost to the global economy’ (OECD, 2018). If labour markets can be opened up and made more enabling for women to access in the same way that men do, then their contribution to growth would be hugely significant – or so the argument goes.

The quotation above from the Kauffman Foundation refers to the United States, but it is a similar story around the world – although these figures will be significantly lower in many developing parts of the world. Women are disproportionately disadvantaged and excluded compared to men when it comes to work.

Activity 3.8: Migrant women

Timing: Allow approximately 10 minutes

Before we look at migrant women and entrepreneurship in these narratives, spend a few minutes thinking about what images are conjured up for you when you hear the term ‘migrant women’. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What type of women are they?
• Where are they from?
• Why are they migrating?
• What type of work do they do?

Now watch Video 3.5 on women migrant workers. How does it compare with your thoughts? (Note that the video mentions ‘CEDAW’, which is the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (OHCHR, 1979).)

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Transcript: Video 3.5 Business and women’s human rights: women migrant workers.

Poverty, war, natural disasters and environmental ruin, unfair cultural practices, and violence against women are just some of the factors that are pushing women to migrate to other countries in search of employment and a better life. However, women are not only being driven to leave their homeland due to unfavourable conditions, but are also attracted to the possibility of achieving economic independence.

Some countries are displaying a demand for women workers based on stereotypical beliefs about women’s suitability for certain tasks, based on ill-conceived beliefs of women submissiveness, appropriateness for simple repetitive tasks, being inexpensive to employ and easy to control.

Consequently, women migrant workers tend to be limited to occupations such as working on the assembly line in factories, in sweatshops, and cleaning and serving in hospitals, restaurants and private residences.

Once women do decide to embark on a journey of migration, they are prone to experience serious rights violations at every stage of the migration process. Some women will experience discrimination even before departure due to their country of origin having imposed bans or restrictions on migrating based on sex, age, marital status, pregnancy, age of children or maternity status.

During transit, some women face sexual and physical abuse from the agents or escorts before reaching their country of destination. Arriving in the country of destination is when women’s expectations can be quickly destroyed, often simply due to a lack of proper information on the migration process and on employment opportunities.

Unprepared women migrants can immediately find themselves in countries that have formal legal restrictions or bans on female employment in certain sectors. In addition, informal discrimination is justified based on religion or tradition in the country of arrival, resulting in the funnelling of female workers into the informal sector.

The informal sector is largely made up of jobs over which there is little or no official control. In certain jobs, they may not even be defined as employees under law – thereby being deprived of legal protections that are available to recognised employees. An example is regularly seen in factories that manufacture and supply the products to multinational corporations.

Due to the absence of any binding contracts, workers may face forms of discrimination such as working long hours without overtime pay; working in overcrowded, unsafe, and unsanitary conditions, with limited access to health services, and undergoing mandatory HIV/AIDS and other testing without consent; suffering sexual and physical abuse; and food and sleep deprivation.

But protection for women migrant workers is growing. A number of international treaties relevant to women migrant workers’ rights are now in place, and foremost amongst them is CEDAW. In 2008, CEDAW adopted General Recommendation Number 26, which provides guidance on how states should meet their obligations to protect and promote the human rights of women migrant workers.

GR26 details the specific sex and gender-based human rights issues that migrant women workers face in their countries of origin, both before departure and after they return, in transit countries, and in destination countries. GR26 also categorises state obligations to prevent discrimination and respect the rights of women migrant workers in the country of origin, transit and destination.

Furthermore, GR26 defines different categories of migrant women and identifies the multi-layered facets of discrimination, and how this invariably impacts women migrant workers. Governments must enact laws prohibiting discrimination against women migrant workers and must address gender stereotypes and ensure protection for these women. Understanding CEDAW helps gender activists to ensure better protection for women migrant workers.

End transcript: Video 3.5 Business and women’s human rights: women migrant workers.

Video 3.5 Business and women’s human rights: women migrant workers.

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Discussion

The narration starts with a litany of factors that may be the cause of female migration, but there is a common denominating trope that the key drivers of women’s migration are negative. To name just a few reasons, women are forced to migrate because of:

• discrimination
• poverty
• violence
• human trafficking.

Women’s migration has historically seen their mobilities filtered through a particular set of patterns and trends like this.

Video 3.5 shows that these negative causes mean that women lack a sense of self-agency or conscious choice. They move and seek a better life not necessarily because they want to but because of adverse living conditions at home.

Much of the academic literature has viewed women as passive and secondary actors in the migratory process, by which we mean that women migrate as a consequence of male migration: the husband, brother or other family members move for work, and the women’s relocation only transplants existing familial dynamics and roles into the new country.

Women as economic migrants is largely an overlooked area of study and where it has been studied it is centred on women in particular roles and sectors. This is not exclusive to academic literature but appears in popular discourse and, as stated in the video, is informing national policies. Women have been viewed as less skilled and educated, cheaper to employ, and far more likely to be found in the informal sector relative to their male counterparts. Further, there is frequently an implicit assumption (as we have seen with other migration discourses) that a lot of this migration is from developing to developed countries.

The types of characteristics associated with entrepreneurs outlined earlier this week, such as drive, risk-taking or ego, were typically thought to be masculine traits. The few studies on women’s entrepreneurship contrasted them with male entrepreneurs and these attributes. The bias inherent in this approach meant that results frequently found women to be less ‘entrepreneurial’, rather than examining women in their own right to see if they inhabit very different qualities.

This is only part of the picture of women in work and business. Female entrepreneurship, to date, represents a key component of the business sector: in 2019, more than 250 million entrepreneurs worldwide (out of more than 400 million) were women. Countries like Indonesia, Thailand, Panama, Qatar, Madagascar and Angola had no gender disparity in the entrepreneurship landscape (Bosna and Kelley, 2019). There are increasing calls for new directions and dimensions in research on women’s entrepreneurship, for example, to focus on how women ‘do’ entrepreneurship (Ahl, 2006; Yanti, 2018; Marlow et al., 2019).

The research on women’s entrepreneurship in sub-Saharan Africa has taken a very particular angle: as a subsistence and survival strategy. In Video 3.6, Abiola George, PhD Student and MIAG team member, holds up a critical light to this work talking about her experience of researching female tech entrepreneurs in Nigeria.

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Transcript: Video 3.6 Female tech entrepreneurs in Nigeria.

Abiola George:

So an Asian proverb says, ‘Where four or more Nigerian women are gathered, there’s an entrepreneur in their midst.’ But depending on who you look at and what reports that you read, in the Nigerian context, it is estimated that approximately 40% of women are entrepreneurs. And it’s one of the highest rates in the region, and I dare say in the world.

However, the picture starts to shift when you look at what kind of entrepreneurship that the women are engaging with. And that is when you see the divide, with an estimated 80% of the women participating in micro-businesses in the informal sector, which really means they’re not registered. And this runs the gamut from the petty trader to people who might even be running digital businesses but not registered formally. And, again, working with the percentages, only about 20% of these women are in the formal sector.

So the 80%, as I call them, these are the women that we have the most about in development literature, then often the targets of empowerment projects by governments and development actors, people trying to empower them, people trying to elevate their status out of poverty. And this is really important work. I do not in any way cast any shade on that. However, there is also, on the other side, the 20% who are in a skilled – I put ‘skills’, again, in parentheses. And the expression ‘high value’ has also been used again. I’m not comfortable with all these terms, but that’s what’s in the literature, so you permit me to use them.

So they’ve been sort of the more high-value entrepreneurship. And they’re becoming more and more prevalent in the tech sector, which for the longest time has been male-dominated and some people would even say it’s still male-dominated. And these women are essentially innovators.

While the 80% have been the targets of interventions, and funding, and everything, these women on the other hand have struggled to fund their businesses and to raise and to skill. However, they’ve recently been the target of venture capital incubators, accelerators – people seeing the potential in their businesses and trying to then see how they can help the women, but also benefit from these businesses.

And in the Nigeria space for my research, I found these women in finance tech, digitising thrift (which is like the collections that the women have traditionally made for years and years), trying to reach the unbanked with digital savings, mobile money, women-only financial services and hubs as well, where they can come and not just learn how to get finance, but also how to make sure that these finances are being used for the purposes which they are being sourced. Also, I found them in health tech, I found them in tech education from the projects, direct so that – enrolling girls in tech, learning management systems, mentoring and all these other spaces that are listed here.

And this is all quite interesting, because the timeline for some of these businesses emerging, I would say on the outer end, and these are maybe some of the people that they would consider themselves early innovators, about 2013 – but really more around 2015, where the technology hub in Nigeria started to enjoy some growth, started to enjoy attention. However, we found that women’s participation has been lagging, but it seems like it’s in an upward trend.

Now because I came into this as a migration researcher, my lens for looking at these women was from the perspective of the conversations on migration and development. And over the years, the emphasis has shifted from looking at migration as a burden on the host country and as a drain on the home country to how that can be mutually beneficial – things coming out of migration. And so the conversation at some point then started to turn towards entrepreneurship. And really what I would say are the pivotal cases, the Chinese and Indian migrants in Silicon Valley, and they are attributed to setting up and also the success of Silicon Valley. These same migrants are then attributed to being a part of the success of making the technology hubs in their home countries the new space where people could outsource labour.

But the jury is out there, because some people would also say that there were already – the environment was already enabling that sort of activity. And perhaps the impact of these migrants were more to amplify what was already in place and open perhaps to more international attention. It’s cast as these migrant entrepreneurs are bringing knowledge, skills, abilities to home in order to help develop the businesses back home. And so this is the length that I went into my research with.

And so the question that I wanted to query: are diaspora women playing a role in the inclusive development of the tech services sector in Nigeria? And by ‘diaspora women’, I included both secular migrants, transnationals, return migrants and even, in some instances, people that maybe had migrated seasonally for education. Maybe they’ve come to get a masters degree, or first degree, or whatever it is. So I included these women because if all the information online is to be believed – and also what the literature seem to be suggesting, especially again, quoting the Indian and the Chinese example, also coupled with the fact that the technology hub in Nigeria is also developing – looking from the outside, it looked initially like it was all due to these returning women who were maybe different from the women who were back home making all of these innovations and amplifying the sector.

And from what is coming from my research, I would say yes and no. Yes, the diaspora women entrepreneurs seem to be better at, I’ve called it ‘online-ing their profiles’, and tapping into international networks that amplify the work they do. And to give you an example, with some of them, their work, actually, you can track the substance, and for some you can’t track. You can track a really beautiful online profile with membership of the right boards and the right foundations doing empowerment in Nigeria. However, tracking the work on ground is a little bit more difficult, and I found that was prevalent with some of these female entrepreneurs that were being celebrated as the diaspora women coming to shake up the sector and make it more inclusive.

And also on the other hand, I found that, like I said, there was an existing or nascent technology hub starting. So coming in at the beginning of something, it helps to amplify one’s role in it, I guess. But I would say that the way our pre-existing local conditions that are critical to some of these businesses coming from abroad – because I found several notable female entrepreneurs in the Nigerian tech space that have never emigrated out of Nigeria. So migration was not a factor or that I found that was important for them being part of this space that one would say was non-traditional, and that all the conversations seem to suggest.

I would urge caution when it comes to these narratives – the knowledge transfers from abroad. And there’s nothing bad with that, because there’s a lot that has come that is good. But from the perspective of governments and policy-makers and development actors, there is, I feel, in my opinion, that there’s a lot of attention that needs to be paid more to enabling local potential to innovatively solve local problems.

End transcript: Video 3.6 Female tech entrepreneurs in Nigeria.

Video 3.6 Female tech entrepreneurs in Nigeria.

Abiola reiterates some of the conversations you read about in earlier sections: that the study of entrepreneurship to date has been viewed through a male-centric lens. Also, where entrepreneurship and development literatures intersect, emphasis has been on what (in terms of resources, skills or knowledges) can benefit the home country.

It is interesting to note that 40% of women in Nigeria are entrepreneurial, but again we see a limited picture of how this entrepreneurship is understood and empirically researched. Most of these women are working in the informal sector and the language is couched very much in terms of poverty-reduction, which is a narrative replicated across the rest of Africa. These women are entrepreneurial as a livelihood strategy and route out of impoverishment, rather than from a sense of aspiration to develop and improve not just their own lives but what they might bring to the wider growth of an economy and society.

Abiola’s PhD research is deliberately focusing on the 20% of Nigerian women who are not in the informal economy but are skilled – or, to use the popular term she doesn’t like, ‘high-value entrepreneurs’. Her research focused on two types of female entrepreneurs:

• An interesting observation is that she sees a similar finding with the diaspora (Nigerian women returning to the country after periods overseas) to some of the literature that looked at Chinese and Indian migrants in Silicon Valley in the US. These women appear to be spearheading tech sector innovation and development in Nigeria through their business enterprises, tapping into the skills, knowledge and networks that they have gained while abroad.
• However, she cautions against viewing these returnees as the sole vehicles for this growth, because the second group – non-migrating female entrepreneurs – are also significantly contributing to the emergence of the digital tech sector.

The connection between migration and inclusive growth, then, is more complex: Abiola’s findings suggest that we cannot uncritically categorise and bound migrants as an exclusive source of new innovations, skills, etc. that ‘add something different’. This risks perpetuating the perception that migrants are ‘super’, when in fact what we see through Abiola’s research is that some of these innovative and entrepreneurial capacities may already be present in the hosting economies.

When studying migration and IG it is important to understand the gendered dimensions and to look at the complex contexts that women migrants operate in. As our experts discussed in Week 2, migration flows link difference places, so understanding the nuances of these different contexts and how they shape migrants’ activities is important.