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Introduction
This paper considers the links between women’s work and home-based enterprise in urban slums of the Global South, and a revisionist concept of the “feminisation of poverty”. In doing so, it contributes to the field of family business, in which attention to gender and under-capitalised firms in developing countries remains rather scant.
The comparative neglect of gender in family business literature and theory is highlighted inter alia by Sharma (2004), with a recent review of 25 influential articles in the subject area scarcely mentioning the term (Chrisman et al., 2010). Moreover, even where research does broach the gender dimensions of family business, this is mainly focused on advanced economic regions. On top of this characteristic blindness to gender and the Global South, in the rare cases where studies extend to developing countries, as in Sonfield and Lussier’s (2009) comparative analysis, which includes India and Egypt, the emphasis is on registered firms with much higher financial turnover than the vast majority of enterprises which women run, or participate in, in the poorer echelons of the informal economy and/or in urban slums. While many poor women in developing economies operate own-account business ventures, rather than manage family firms, some of the gendered constraints women face in reconciling the social demands and expectations of family duties, with remunerated work and enterprise, resonate with concerns raised in the context of gender-sensitive family business literature in the Global North (Coutts, 2012).
The strains on women imposed by heavy, diverse, gender-inequitable, and often perceptibly mounting, labour burdens are pertinent throughout this paper. In the first section I critique silence on this within conventional portrayals of the “feminisation of poverty”, which to date have been characterised by a rather narrow focus on incomes and female-headed households. Introducing an alternative concept, denominated as a “feminisation of responsibility and/or obligation”, and formulated largely on the basis of comparative ethnographic research in The Gambia, The Philippines and Costa Rica (Chant, 2007, 2008), I contend that if we are to more accurately capture the essence of contemporary gendered privations in the Global South, much more attention needs to be paid to the growing inputs made by women to livelihood strategies in all households, and perhaps especially in those headed by men.
Integral to my...