Teaching with the third wave new feminists - MailChimp

Facing Uncertainties and Self-questioning: What it Takes to Try it OutRecent research focusing on female entrepreneurship points out several difficultiesspecific for these women’s situation. 8 Our experience covers some of them,but we also managed to avoid some of the usual pitfalls mainly because of thevery specific nature of our activity and of our professional and personal profiles.However, we also faced some other difficulties, precisely for these same reasons.Being Female Entrepreneurs… just like the Others?If we start with the more common or general barriers women meet while startingoff in business, we definitely had to cope (and still do) with the tricky questionof balancing work and private life. At the beginning of our joint venture onlyone out of the four associates had children and thus the daily organization of ourwork remained quite fluent. As feminists, we were aware of these difficulties andconscious of the double/triple working day of female business creators. However,our feminist engagement also allowed us to emancipate ourselves from the stereotypicalroles and gender arrangements within the couple and we were able tonegotiate the equal sharing of household responsibilities with our partners.Our problems in terms of organization and time restrictions were morelinked to our dual activity, as we all had a full or part-time employment inaddition to our training and consulting business. In consequence, we had tomanage not only our quite different personal working timetables and rhythms,but also the potential overlapping and conflicts of interests between our ownbusiness and our respective jobs, located as they are within the same or quitesimilar activity sectors.So far we have managed to keep the project going and even to expandour activities, but it has not been without difficulties and sacrifices. We oftenwork on weekends and evenings, obviously at the expenses of our personaland family time. We still face problems in anticipating the amount of workand we have not yet been able to work serenely without constant pressure andhurry. For the moment, we all continue to work outside Valta Göra. However,we are more and more aware that quite soon we will have to make choicesconcerning our professional activities and/or to find other ways of copingwith our growing business (sub-contracting, recruiting other associates).8Fiducial, L’Observatoire Fiducial de l’entrepreneuriat au féminin (Paris: Fiducial, 2006).114