Abstract:

Over the last few decades, migration has been growing. 23 million people (5.1 %) of the 447.3 million people living in the EU on 1st January 2020 were non-EU citizens (Eurostat, 2021). As a consequence, the rise of migrant entrepreneurship — small business activities carried out by migrants in their destination countries — has become the focus of a large body of academic research (Barberis and Solano, 2018). Despite a prosperous development of scholarship available in the domain of migrant entrepreneurship, scarce attention has been paid to the gendered nature of migrant entrepreneurship. The theoretical progress of the concept of migrant entrepreneurship has also been constrained within a normative explanation relating to male entrepreneurs (Vershinina and Cruz, 2021). Entrepreneurship is argued to provide ‘flexibility’, ‘autonomy’ and ‘empowerment’ for female entrepreneurs as they are able to escape from male domination in their occupations such as breaking the ‘glass ceiling’ and generally living within their societies. (Alkhaled and Berglund, 2018), which includes, flexibility guaranteed by running a business, which has given more chances to reconcile conflicts between work and family, and has been mostly addressed  (De Luca and Ambrosini, 2019). In this vein, family embeddedness perspective (Aldrich & Cliff, 2003) posits that families and businesses are interwoven bodies, and that family dynamics impinge on fundamental entrepreneurial processes.