Leaving the public sector for a new private venture - creating context from a gender perspective

This paper deals with the issue of entrepreneurship and new venture creation. More specifically, it is about women, who have left their jobs in the public sector and started a new venture within the same professional field as their former employment. We perceive leaving a job in the public sector and starting a new venture as an entrepreneurial act in the sense that the norms and values of the public sector do not always support local initiatives. Previous research has shown that the received view of entrepreneurship and gender has a tendency to recreate women's subordination. Even attempts to apply a gender perspective contain the potential hazard of recreating what we want to challenge. The question then arises if it is at all possible to approach entrepreneurship and gender without recreating the received view in the field. Our conclusion is that by acknowledging the fact that there are multiple narratives to be told, there are also several ways to contribute to our knowledge about entrepreneurship and gender. The intention here is to widen the concept of entrepreneurship to also include nuances that otherwise run the risk of being neglected. The theoretical basis is a discussion about the ways that norms and conceptions of entrepreneurship affect women who are entrepreneurs, how they perceive their roles as entrepreneurs considering that entrepreneurship is a male gendered concept (Ogbor, 2000). The subordinate position in society of women who are business owners, is recreated by means of various strategies, such as ignoring similarities and exaggerating differences between women and men. Another strategy is to describe women who are entrepreneurs as exceptions; e.g. they are not like women in general. They are different in some way. Yet another practice is to distinguish between 'typical' and 'extraordinary' women who run their own businesses. The typical ones are women with small businesses that make small profits in industries traditionally occupied by women. The extraordinary ones - and hence untypical - direct profitable enterprises in industries traditionally occupied by men, which is what is generally thought of as typical businesses. (Ahl, 2002) However, several studies suggest that there are more similarities than differences between sexes considering personality and psychological factors (e.g. Sexton and Bowman-Upton 1990/2006), or that differences are caused by business and industry choices (Holmquist and Sundin 2002).