Socially constructed masculine domination: officials’ perception of female entrepreneurs in Kerala, India

Many earlier works on female entrepreneurship have been based on the liberal feminist view that treats women as equals with men, and thus assumes that barriers lead to the women’s underperformance. Researchers have stressed the importance of researching men and women as separate entities and the need to move beyond victim blaming, that is, the belief that women should be held accountable for their circumstances (Ahl and Marlow, 2012). The paucity of studies addressing feminist theories of female entrepreneurship has led to the call for incorporating post-structural feminist research, which considers social constructs through history, geography and culture (Ahl and Marlow, 2012; Foss, 2010). Post-structural feminism in female entrepreneurship research gained popularity in the late 2000s; researchers have used Foucault’s work, which argued that discourse analysis is necessary to understand social practices (Ahl, 2006). Social practices in a society are ‘created through discourses, which can be defined as how something is presented or regarded’ (ibid., p. 597). By adopting this view, the present chapter explores the perception of agents in implementing programmes that facilitate female entrepreneurship, to clarify gender relations in the current Indian societal structure. Furthermore, this chapter aims to help to establish some preliminary assumptions regarding the gender gap in reforms for female entrepreneurs in Kerala, India, by integrating feminist theory into the female entrepreneurial ecosystem.