Entrepreneurship and the Art of Seduction: Gender Norms and Women-Focused Support in Brussels

This thesis explores how women entrepreneurs in Brussels experience entrepreneurship and navigate the support structures available to them. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and participant observation done at two events aimed at supporting women entrepreneurs, it examines how Euro-American gendered ideas of entrepreneurship are present in the Brussels context. The ethnographic material consists of perspectives from eight women entrepreneurs and two professionals working within support initiatives in Brussels. The thesis draws on Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, Bruni, Gherardi, and Poggio’s ethnographic work on doing gender and doing entrepreneurship, Berglund and Tillmar’s framework of entrepreneuring as gendered play, and intersectionality as developed by Crenshaw and Collins. Together, these frameworks help make sense of material that raises questions about how gender norms relate to what forms of entrepreneurial activity get recognised. I argue that women-focused initiatives in Brussels name gender in order to address inequalities that stem partly from a masculine-coded ideal of entrepreneurship, but I ask whether these initiatives risk reinforcing the categories that help maintain such barriers. Intersectionality helps question the category of women entrepreneurs itself.