TUM School of Management, Technische U. München, Germany
Individuals in developing economies often face considerable adversity. Under such circumstances, they can turn to illegal entrepreneurship. However, from a gendered perspective, women are typically considered incongruent with the masculinity of crime and entrepreneurship and, thus, illegal entrepreneurship. In this study, we were interested in exploring how women overcome gender-based obstacles to engage in illegal entrepreneurship and to what effect. We use an inductive approach to explore how women entrepreneurs produce and sell illegal alcohol within their impoverished communities throughout India, which led to a gender model of women’s illegal entrepreneurship. This model provides three primary contributions. First, we provide new insights into how women who engage in criminality can work with, benefit from, and overcome social expectations of gender through a series of carveouts— they provide themselves space from gender-role incongruence by engaging in illegal entrepreneurial activities and generating outcomes that are gender congruent. Second, we highlight how outcomes can be gender congruent or incongruent depending on one’s construal of the illegal entrepreneurial process. Finally, we shine a light on how the short- run benefits of entrepreneurial action can perpetuate a process that generates long-run costs for individuals, families, and communities.
