The deal: gender, entrepreneurial business and family life

This study explores the interrelationship of business and family life. It examines how men and women as entrepreneurs, and as the spouses of entrepreneurs, account for their business and family lives. My findings suggest the persistence of deeply embedded beliefs about what men and women should do, especially as parents, despite institutional and structural change. These beliefs take the form of a genderbased ‘deal’ that frames the control and use of resources (money, time, space and care) that underpin engagement in business and family life. Most of the male entrepreneurs in this study were intensely engaged in business and dipped in and out of family life. Belief in the deal enabled these entrepreneurial men to define the rules of resource use. They profited from the deal in that it enabled them to accumulate more economic capital while having a family. However, identifying the winners and losers of the deal is not straightforward. These men ‘won’ in business but for some, this came at the expense of their health and personal relationships. The entrepreneurial men’s belief in the deal shaped their wives’ control and use of resources. Their wives accepted the terms of the deal because of their commitment to a particular form of mothering, their beliefs about family, the benefits of a privileged lifestyle, or because it seemed nonnegotiable. Most argued that accepting the deal was their choice and an assertion of their commitment to nonmarket values. This locked them into dependency and denied them direct access to convertible forms of capital. The female entrepreneurs managed their resources so that they could engage in both business and family life. They understood this as their choice. Most experienced intense social and personal pressure to comply with the terms of the deal as mothers and wives. Their economic capital meant that they could modify the deal but they did not – or could not – fundamentally challenge it. The husbands admired and supported their entrepreneurial wives; they saw it as their wives’ choice to engage in business. Some understood the shifts in power that resulted from their wives’ wealth as an opportunity for greater involvement with their children, and for personal growth. None saw their entrepreneurial wives as providers. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of field, capital, and habitus, this study suggests new ways of understanding how men and women compete for resources, which, in turn, affects their accumulation of various forms of capital.