Proceedings of The 6th Global Conference on Women’s Studies
Year: 2024
DOI:
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Intersectional Perspectives on Entrepreneurship and Self-Employment of Migrant Women across Canada
Carolina Gallo Garcia
ABSTRACT:
While women and immigrant entrepreneurs receive growing attention as potential catalysts for economic development, the connection between female entrepreneurship within migration contexts remains relatively underexplored in academic research. Policy frameworks, however, typically highlight “migrant” and “women” entrepreneurs as crucial for the integration of immigrant families and economic development. Through a narrative review, this paper sought to synthesize current knowledge from multidisciplinary research on the entrepreneurship and self-employment of migrant women in Canada, aiming to outline state-of-the-art insights and potential future research directions. The findings emphasize the significant barriers these women face when entering the Canadian labor market, such as lack of language proficiency, non-recognition of diplomas and professional experiences, deskilling processes, and challenges in reconciling paid work with housework, still largely performed by women, where entrepreneurship and self-employment emerge as viable solutions to these challenges. Most research work analyzed in this study evidence the need for intersectional frameworks to apprehend micro and macro-social contexts and to understand how racial, ethnic, gender, and class dynamics interact in complex ways to influence the experiences of migrant women from diverse backgrounds. The paper concludes by advocating for the concept of “intersectionality as a method” as crucial for examining how social attributes of difference interplay as migrant women navigate their pathways to integration and sense of belonging through entrepreneurship, thereby shaping their life trajectories within the complex context of economic integration policies.
keywords: citizenship; female entrepreneurship; migrant women; integration; self-employment