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Respectable Edge Walking: Women Entrepreneurs in Sri Lanka Navigating Gendered Norms and Expectations for Legitimacy

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Date

2025

Authors

Somarathna, Kankanige Yeshika Jayathri

Supervisor

Singh, Smita
Harris, Candice

Item type

Thesis

Degree name

Doctor of Philosophy

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Publisher

Auckland University of Technology

Abstract

Legitimacy in entrepreneurship has long been assumed to be a gender-neutral phenomenon. However, there is now a growing acceptance that legitimacy is gendered. Women face significant challenges in the pursuit of legitimacy due to stereotypical gender expectations associated with both womanhood and entrepreneurship. These challenges are pronounced in patriarchal societies like Sri Lanka, where rigid gender norms influence how audiences granting legitimacy perceive women entrepreneurs. This necessitates women carefully navigating gendered expectations for their legitimacy as entrepreneurs. Legitimacy can be examined from three perspectives: product/outcome, process, and perception (Suddaby et al., 2017). Much of the existing entrepreneurship literature examines legitimacy as an outcome, emphasising how it is gained during a business’s nascent phase and assuming it remains stable once achieved. This view, however, overlooks how audience evaluations and judgments shape women’s experiences of legitimacy as they navigate gendered expectations throughout their entrepreneurial journeys. Against the above backdrop, the primary aim of this thesis is to understand women entrepreneurs’ experiences of navigating gendered expectations for their entrepreneurial legitimacy. In doing so, I employ legitimacy as a perception perspective, examining how women experience tensions and enablers and how they navigate them for their self-perception of legitimacy as entrepreneurs. Accordingly, the overarching research question of this thesis is “How do Sri Lankan women entrepreneurs navigate gendered expectations in their quest for legitimacy?” The two supporting subquestions are “What are the tensions and enablers experienced by Sri Lankan women entrepreneurs in their quest for legitimacy?” and “What are the experiences of Sri Lankan women entrepreneurs doing and undoing gender in their quest for legitimacy?” Positioned within feminist epistemology, this study employed interpretative phenomenological analysis to explore the legitimacy experiences of 22 Sri Lankan women entrepreneurs through in-depth interviews. The findings revealed that women entrepreneurs sought legitimacy from two contexts—family and business—facing tensions in both. They navigated these challenges by leveraging aspects of masculinity and femininity, reinforcing and challenging gender norms. While demonstrating agency, women also relied on family support, making their navigation of gender a supported one. Based on the findings, women’s legitimacy experiences were classified into four common categories, presented as a typology. The findings make three contributions to entrepreneurship literature. Firstly, the thesis demonstrates that entrepreneurial legitimacy is an ongoing, co-constructed experience for women, with family playing a significant role. The extended family created the most difficult tensions - especially mothers-in-law. Spouses, though, were the women’s most significant source of empowerment. Secondly, the findings reveal that traditional femininity serves as a resource for women’s entrepreneurial legitimacy. They leveraged traditional femininity—manifested as respectability through cultural ideals of Lajja Baya and Kula Katha in Sri Lanka—to reinforce and challenge gender norms. Thirdly, the findings reveal that the outcomes of women’s legitimacy efforts can be variable. Despite the various ways legitimacy was sought, most participants experienced negative outcomes such as financial, personal, and social costs, and health and well-being issues. This highlights the darker side of entrepreneurship yet also underscores how women exercised agency, demonstrating resilience despite these complexities.

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http://hdl.handle.net/10292/19469

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