Migrant women entrepreneurship in Sweden: A life-course approach to contextualize gendered career trajectories.

Emerging from discussions within gender, contextual embeddedness, and migration, this research addresses the issue of the labor market integration of highly educated migrant women in Sweden. The thesis seeks to broaden the understanding of the gender gap in entrepreneurship by contextualizing the decisions of starting a business, analyzing the different strategies employed by migrant women to develop their businesses as well as the role of entrepreneurship in their lives in relation to gender norms. The study uses the life course approach and methods as well as a gendered multi-context framework (Welter et al., 2014) to investigate the following research questions: 1) Under what circumstances do migrant women turn to entrepreneurship in their life course and what are the associated changes on their career? 2) How do they mobilize social ties across different spatial contexts and business stages? 3) How do migrant women make sense of entrepreneurship in relation to gendered societal norms from the country of origin and destination? The results suggest that complex temporal, spatial, social, and institutional dynamics condition the decision to start a business, and the different strategies employed. Furthermore, entrepreneurship appears as a way to challenge and overcome gender norms