"We can't all be Oprah": how Black women negotiate entrepreneurship
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Entrepreneurship has come to occupy a significant position in how nations define themselves and their citizens. Although, the ideal entrepreneur, like Oprah Winfrey, is far removed from today's reality, individuals are increasingly called upon to be entrepreneurial. This study of entrepreneurship goes behind the allure of Oprah, a complex and gendered version of the self-made man, and examines how processes of race, class and gender simultaneously operate to structure this labour market niche. I argue that Black women's histories of slavery, indentured labour and migration have profoundly shaped their experiences as entrepreneurs. Moving away from the Black ethnic enclave, a restrictive spatial conceptualization of Black business activity in Canada, this study re-conceptualizes Black women's participation in entrepreneurship as being inextricably linked to waged work. Despite formidable obstacles, entrepreneurship is alluring to Black women because it offers them freedom and independence from continued race, class and gender victimization. Through the examination of empirical evidence, such as, government documents, a survey, websites, and data derived from fifty-three interviews with women entrepreneurs of Afro-Caribbean descent in various industries in Ontario, this research more specifically examines how entrepreneurship (as a status of work and an ideology) is used to negotiate the labour market. Entrepreneurship allows Black women to have greater mobility and economic independence. They use the space of entrepreneurship to deploy a counter-discourse of race, which is both liberating and exclusionary. As an intensely political space, entrepreneurship provides the opportunity for the making of community as opposed to the individual making of self. As entrepreneurs, Black women also have the ability to fashion themselves into respectable professional workers, an identity that has long been denied to them. Despite it being a partial refuge, entrepreneurship is nonetheless a tenuous space. Black women must negotiate their visibility and independent status as well as the various meanings that are attached to the categories of entrepreneur and self-employed. Although entrepreneurship offers a way for Black women to survive, thrive and challenge oppressive systems, it remains a racialized, contested and contradictory space where power is negotiated.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".