‘Middle-class’ Women Entrepreneurs: Exploring Their Motivations and Challenges in India

The article is based on a qualitative study of 60 women entrepreneurs belonging to the urban middle class in Kolkata, undertaken to explore how their demographic characteristics, social values and agency shape their entrepreneurship initiatives. It examines the relative importance of different factors behind the motivations and challenges of middle-class women engaged in business. The findings suggest that the educated middle-class women entrepreneurs are motivated predominantly by aspirations for self-actualisation, but their initiatives are impeded by institutional inadequacies. Although explicit gendered social barriers are relatively less in their case, there exists an undercurrent of gender stereotyping that exaggerates the institutional barriers. It is suggested that policy measures for entrepreneurial development of educated middle-class women should be distinctly different from those designed for low-skilled, poor women with lower levels of education.