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Forthcoming in Information, Communication, and Society (2017)
Gender and Self-Enterprise in the Social Media Age: A Digital Double Bind
Brooke Erin Duffy and Urszula Pruchniewska[i]
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The profound growth of independent employment in post-industrial economies has paralleled a vibrant ethos of self-enterprise — one captured by the prodding assertion that “we’re all entrepreneurs now.” Amidst ubiquitous technologies of production, distribution, and promotion, the ideal of entrepreneurialism has taken on a political valance: that is, individuals are ostensibly “empowered” to pursue their passion projects in digital environments. This project brings gender politics to the fore of contemporary discourses of online entrepreneurship. We draw upon in-depth interviews with twenty-two independently-employed female professionals, the majority of whom work in digital media and other creative fields, to understand the role of social media in their self-starter careers. We found that many interviewees felt compelled to develop and present online personae that conformed to traditional prescriptions for femininity—a quandary that we term the digital double bind. An updated version of the career impasse that female workers face in traditional work environments, the digital double bind is structured through three distinct, yet interrelated, social media imperatives: (1). soft self-promotion; (2). interactive intimacy; and (3). compulsory visibility. Participants’ reflections on these imperatives emerge from the traditionally masculine-coded nature of entrepreneurship and its markers of success, which require female workers to assume additional risk and engage in invisible labor. The digital double bind is thus a testament to enduring structural inequalities that render female self-enterprise an inferior category of entrepreneurship; promises of digitally-enabled meritocracy, we conclude, are largely superficial.
If a rousing provocation among critical theorists at the close of the aughts was whether we are ‘all cultural workers now,’ an updated question for the present decade might be, ‘are we all entrepreneurs now?’ Certainly, ‘entrepreneurship’ is a profoundly romanticized ideal in the early twenty-first century, and the spirit of self-enterprise assumes myriad guises in popular culture: ‘entrepreneurship’ sections in media outlets ranging from The New York Times to the BBC; tech innovators glibly thrust into the realm of celebrity culture; splashy conferences convened by career self-starters; and—perhaps most decisively—consumer culture’s embrace of the ‘entrepreneur uniform.’ The latter includes hoodies inscribed with Silicon Valley manifestos: ‘9 to 5 is for the weak,’ ‘Always Hustling,’ and ‘Dis/Ruptive’ (Startupdrugz.com, 2016). Though the prototype of the entrepreneur circulating in mainstream culture was—and, largely, remains—a narrow one, recent narratives about technologically-enabled industrialism invoke a more inclusive notion of self-enterprise.
Indeed, the valorization of entrepreneurship must be understood against the backdrop of digital media’s promise of meritocracy: with enough hard work, anyone can make a living from her passion project. This upbeat rhetoric is evident in media reports and tech think pieces alike. In a Fast Company article heralding the emergence of ‘the micro-entrepreneurship economy,’ startup founder Jamie Wong enthused:
What defines this new economy is that it’s built on the empowerment of individuals and the technology that enables this. It’s allowing individuals to create their own jobs…Technology now provides an opportunity for people anywhere in the world to monetize their passions (2012).
Though such acclaim of the so-called ‘new economy’ appears gender-neutral, the uptick in digitally networked entrepreneurship has been linked to progressive gender politics. While a writer for Entrepreneur proclaimed that the ‘Online Marketplace Is Perfect for Women in Business’ (Krishnan, 2015), researchers at Stanford University explored the valuation of ‘feminist entrepreneurship’ – wherein traditionally feminine (or ‘soft’) skills are deployed as a form of ‘capital’ in the business world (Orser and Elliot, 2015). At the same time, the rise of independent work has been framed as a movement away from bureaucratic, male-dominated work structures (e.g., Kepler and Shane, 2007). Flexible work arrangements, in particular, have been celebrated for their emancipatory potential. As the argument goes, career-minded women, using technologies that enable them to ‘work from home,’ are able to more seamlessly combine personal and professional obligations. Of course, this narrative fails to ‘interrogat[e] the requirement for women’s flexible workplace arrangements in particular, instead taking it as given that women will retain the historically and culturally ascribed role of carer—if not by choice, then by default’ (Gregg, 2008, p. 286).
Amidst a burgeoning social media economy, genres of self-enterprise have emerged that enable women to profit from creative activities located within the domestic sphere, including mommy blogging, lifestyle blogging, and craft micro-economies. For middle-class women of childbearing age, online micro-enterprises like Etsy are articulated as a ‘magical solution’ that proffers an ‘important compromise between paid work and unpaid domestic responsibilities’ (Luckman, 2016, p. 91). Meanwhile, for younger women, digital entrepreneurship provides a model of ‘having it all’ where passion and profit meld (Author, 2015).
Given these nuanced—perhaps contradictory—frameworks for thinking about female entrepreneurship in a digital media age, this project seeks to provide insight into the lived experiences of female internet entrepreneurs. We were especially interested in the role of social networking sites in their professional ventures, given social media’s governing logics of impression management and reputation building (Pooley, 2010; Hearn, 2010; Marwick, 2013). Data for this project come from in-depth interviews with twenty-two independently employed female professionals, the majority of whom work in digital creative industries, including professional blogging, writing, entertainment, and marketing.
We found that interviewees expressed a compulsion to develop and present online personae that conform to traditional prescriptions for femininity, including modesty, sociality, and an aura of decorum. We term this quandary a digital double bind. An updated version of the career impasse that female workers face in offline work environments, the digital double bind is structured through three distinct, yet interrelated, social media imperatives:
(1). soft self-promotion, branding the self in ways deemed ‘organic’ or ‘subtle’
(2). interactive intimacy, relation-building practices; and
(3). compulsory visibility, the injunction for workers to put their private selves on public display.
Participants’ reflections on these imperatives emerge from the masculine-coded nature of entrepreneurship and its markers of success, which require them to assume additional risk and engage in unpaid, invisible labor. The digital double bind, we conclude, is a testament to enduring structural inequalities that render female self-enterprise an inferior category of entrepreneurship.
Self-Employment as an ‘Entrepreneurial Renaissance’
Inquiries into the shifting nature and conditions of work in Western, post-industrial economies have proliferated over the last decade. To some, the so-called ‘new economy’ is brimming with opportunity and promises to unshackle employees from the traditional, bureaucratic structures that characterized work over much of the 20th century. As one Freelancers Union report opened, ‘Gone are the days of the traditional 9-to-5. We’re entering a new era of work — project-based, independent, exciting, potentially risky, and rich with opportunities’ (Freelancers Union & Elance-oDesk, 2014). Of course, it is precisely this upbeat rhetoric that veils some of the less auspicious elements of life in a ‘gig economy,’ including the lack of long-term stability, absence of benefits, and limited access to organized support. These features impact categories of workers quite unevenly; according to a 2016 Pew Research report, people of color, individuals from low-income households, and those lacking college education rely more on digitally-enabled gig work as a source of essential—rather than surplus—income (Smith, 2016). Similarly, Suri and Gray (2016) found that individuals who rely on online gig work do so out of necessity: they often have a family situation/constraint that forces them to seek flexible work arrangements (para. 10). Further, there is unevenness across social categories in the types of online labor classified as ‘entrepreneurial’; those who use labor platforms, such as ride hailing, have lower household incomes and articulate gig work as “essential” income than those who utilize capital platforms, such as online selling (Smith 2016). Thus, those from structurally disadvantaged positions are thus disproportionately affected by the benefits-stripped precarity endemic to the so-called platform economy. More broadly, scholars of cultural labor have critiqued the structural conditions that have incited a new worker subjectivity that is, in Gill’s (2010) words, tasked with ‘managing the self in conditions of radical uncertainty.’
These writings offer starkly different perspectives on the features and consequences of self-employment at a cultural moment when the independent workforce is growing at an astonishing clip. In the U.S., the rate of independent employees is expected to balloon to nearly 50 percent by the year 2021 (MBO Partners, 2015). A similar workforce shift is unfolding in the United Kingdom, where there are 5.2 million self-employed workers, which represents a 51% increase since 2000 (Office for National Statistics, 2015). The pervasiveness of independent work has paralleled a vibrant spirit of self-enterprise that is upheld in the popular imagination as evidence of ‘an entrepreneurial renaissance’ (Fonseca, 2014). Expressions of this renaissance are kaleidoscopic: from a booming market of literature targeting aspiring entrepreneurs, to policy initiatives designed to nurture career self-starters, to commencement speeches that prod bright-eyed graduates, ‘we’re all entrepreneurs now’ (Tullman, 2015). Of course, these discourses surrounding self-starter careers conceal the reality that ‘entrepreneurship’ is increasingly deployed as a euphemism for independent or contingent work rather than a clearly bounded category.
Such valorization of entrepreneurship cannot be bracketed off from cheering assertions about the digital economy, particularly the ideologies of meritocracy and bootstrap success so pervasive in startup culture (Marwick, 2013). Tech reporters routinely champion digital technologies for enabling a new class of internet-enabled entrepreneur to rise up the ranks—one unencumbered by traditional constraints. In the earlier-cited article about micro-entrepreneurship, Jamie Wong enthuses that the displacement of traditional structures allows ‘individuals access to more fulfilling, rewarding, and authentic lives’ (Wong, 2012). Drawing attention to the role of technology in such assurances, business writer Sherry Gray (2016) noted, ‘With the explosion of digital entrepreneurship, it is easier to live the dream than ever before.’
This utopian rhetoric seems to suggest that men and women have a level playing field, because the structural barriers that hamper women working in traditional workplaces are removed in independent work online. The sense of gender-blindness aligns with tropes of postfeminism, the notion that feminism has been ‘taken into account,’ with the goals of gender parity already achieved (McRobbie, 2009, p.1). Yet as Gill (2014) and others have argued, independent careers, especially those in media and creative industries, are marked by persistent inequalities. Managing the dissonance between the gendered everyday experiences and the myth of meritocracy permeating creative work means that “the repudiation of any kind of inequality or unfairness itself becomes a key part of the labouring subjectivity required—one that is organised around individualism and entrepreneurialism and creativity” (p. 253). By rendering structural inequalities invisible, these disavowals effectively maintain gendered divisions and hierarchies in cultural work (ibid).
Female Entrepreneurship in the Digital Age
The figure of the entrepreneur circulating in business as well as in the popular imagination is a masculine one, or what Ahl (2004) describes as the ‘independent self-made man’ (p. 58; see also Taylor, 2015). While the paragons of entrepreneurial success that dominated the 19th and 20th centuries—those like Horatio Alger and Andrew Carnegie—were unabashedly masculine, the contemporary version is a geeky, no collar tech genius in the likes of Mark Zuckerberg or the late Steve Jobs. Despite the pervasiveness of the white, male entrepreneur, recent years have witnessed a sharp rise in female entrepreneurship. In digital contexts, this includes mommy blogs (Hunter, 2016), fashion and beauty blogs (Author, 2015), and craft micro-enterprises like Etsy (Luckman, 2016), where narratives about independent workers are framed as digital democratization. A report on the Etsy economy, which is eighty-six percent female, enthused that the site ‘democratizes access to entrepreneurship [where]…women create businesses that not only enable them to earn income, but also offer flexibility and an outlet for their creative passions’ (Etsy, 2015).
To be sure, feminist scholars and writers have drawn necessary attention to the problems with discourses of digital cottage industries. For one, discussions of ‘financial independence’ are inherently gendered through the implication that a woman can now be liberated from her spouse’s earnings. Narratives of flexibility also figure prominently in various sub-genres of female entrepreneurship. Taylor (2015) notes how in an era of remote employment, the flexibility of working from home seems to represent a ‘new mystique’ that has emerged in the specter of the Friedanesque version. Accordingly, freelance journalist Sarah Grey (2016) describes some of the primary reasons the traditional employment economy ‘squeezes women out of the workplace,’ including ‘lack of paid maternity leave, inadequate time off, little flexibility, and unequal pay that doesn’t always cover the cost of childcare.’ As her comment lays bare, conventional work structures remain unchallenged and, we add, are even obscured by the romanticized draw of independent work.
Considering these critiques, we contend that further research is necessary to understand the lived experiences of female entrepreneurs in the digital economy.
Method
This project draws upon in-depth interviews with twenty-two female independent professionals/small business owners, the majority of whom work in media, marketing, or creative fields.[ii] As we were especially interested in the meaning of ‘entrepreneur’ as an imagined social category, we began our recruitment through media coverage of digital/social media entrepreneurs and, secondarily, used Twitter to generate a list of self-identified female entrepreneurs. We initially contacted more than eighty potential participants, including full-time bloggers, writers, designers, photographers, and marketers; as interviews began, we utilized a snowball sample to generate an additional list of potential participants. We interviewed seventeen women in 2016 and also draw upon five in-depth interviews conducted for separate research projects on the gendering of social media labor (Author A, 2016) and self-branding among feminist bloggers (Author B, 2016). Given recent research highlighting the significance of existing markers of privilege for entrepreneurial subjects (Groth, 2015), it is important to acknowledge the composition of our sample: the majority of women (n=18) were white, college-educated, and based upon discussions, we presume middle-class. Participants used a variety of social media platforms for their branding and promotional activities—the majority of which have a higher proportion of female users: Facebook (83% of women vs. 79% of men use it), Instagram (38% of women vs. 26% of men), Twitter (25% of women vs. 24% of men), and Pinterest (45% of women vs. 17% of men). LinkedIn, which one of our participants mentioned, was an exception with 31% of men and 27% of women active on the site (Greenwood et al, 2016).