Creditworthy Women: Enforcing Entrepreneurial Femininity in a Microcredit Market

Abstract

Approaches to gender and feminism have been reshaped in line with neoliberal imperatives, elevating entrepreneurial femininity as an ideal designed to produce women who fulfill both productive and reproductive roles. Scholarship has examined entrepreneurial femininities from two primary angles: micro-level studies on how women embody and resist gendered entrepreneurial subjectivities, and macro-level analyses of the appropriation of feminist narratives by neoliberal agendas. Fewer studies have examined the professionals who operate between these levels, such as microcredit loan officers who connect global economic systems and local gender enforcement through practices of financial evaluation. Using interviews and observational data from a microcredit provider in Colombia, I show how loan officers operationalize gendered criteria in their assessment practices. By demonstrating how loan officers envision and evaluate microentrepreneurial femininity, I reveal how financial assessment becomes a site where gender performance is monitored, interpreted, and enforced with material consequences. The findings also show inequalities in the standard of femininity to which women are held: Microentrepreneurial femininity, with its intensive attention to family harmony and reproductive labor, operates most powerfully at the survival-scale economic margins where women’s businesses remain small and their financial independence limited. Finally, I demonstrate how loan officers’ evaluative work operates as a mechanism through which neoliberal economic governance filters down to reach individuals’ everyday financial lives.