Contextualizing inclusive entrepreneurship: an intersectional perspective of women's entrepreneurship in Sweden Open Access

Entrepreneurship is often portrayed as a universal pathway to empowerment, growth and opportunity. However, a closer look at the literature reveals that mainstream entrepreneurship research continues to reflect narrow assumptions about who counts as an entrepreneur and whose experiences matter. Historically, scholarship has been dominated by accounts of White men from majority cultural and socio-economic groups (Marlow, 2020; Essers and Benschop, 2007). Although research on women's entrepreneurship has expanded, it often focuses on White women in western settings, leaving limited space for analyses that consider the intersections of gender, ethnicity, class and migration (Marlow and Martinez Dy, 2018; Essers et al., 2023). Similarly, studies of ethnic minority or migrant entrepreneurs frequently highlight family and cultural networks but neglect the role of gendered power relations (Kerr and Mandorff, 2023).

These limitations are not only academic but have practical consequences. Policies and support initiatives built on partial understandings risk reproducing the very inequalities they seek to address. Inclusive entrepreneurship is premised on the idea that “entrepreneurship is for everyone” (Rolle et al., 2020). However, this ambition requires us to go beyond documenting underrepresentation to interrogating the “unknowns” of diversity and inclusion in entrepreneurship: whose voices are missing, how contexts shape inclusion and where policy frameworks fall short. Aman et al.’s (2024) recent study of migrant women entrepreneurs finds that while diversity produced complexities and new ideas, equity and perceived equality were complex issues linked to one's background and situation.

Sweden offers a compelling setting for exploring these questions. Internationally recognized for its commitment to gender equality and social welfare, Sweden positions itself as a leader in inclusive entrepreneurship (Holmquist and Sundin, 2021; Ahl and Marlow, 2021). Women and men participate in the labour market at near-equal levels, and entrepreneurship policy documents emphasize diversity and inclusion. At the same time, empirical evidence points to persistent gendered and racialized disparities in entrepreneurial participation, legitimacy and outcomes (Alsos et al., 2010; Statistics Sweden, 2022; GEM, 2022). This paradox, formal equality in policy and discourse – versus structural exclusion in practice, raises critical questions about how inclusive entrepreneurship is experienced and enacted. Moreover, women immigrant entrepreneurs (WIEs) in Sweden represent a growing yet underexplored group. As Sweden continues to experience high levels of immigration alongside persistent barriers to labour market integration, self-employment has become an important avenue for many migrants, especially women, to achieve economic participation and social inclusion (Ohlsson et al., 2012). While previous studies have examined immigrant and minority women entrepreneurs in Sweden (Yeröz, 2019), few have applied a translocational positionality (TP) lens in their analyses.

Against this backdrop, this study addresses these gaps by exploring how WIEs in Sweden navigate entrepreneurial ecosystems that are simultaneously framed as inclusive yet experienced as exclusionary. Anchored in intersectionality and TP perspectives (Anthias, 2002, 2009; Holvino, 2010), this study addresses the central research question: What role does context play in inclusive entrepreneurship, and how can policy frameworks support the inclusion of underrepresented groups? We draw on semi-structured interviews with 17 WIEs to investigate how women experience constraints and enablers in entrepreneurship, how they cope with exclusion and how policy frameworks address, or fail to address, their needs. In addressing the special issue's call to explore “what we don't yet know” about inclusive entrepreneurship, this paper foregrounds the lived experiences of women who are too often overlooked in both research and policy. Their narratives reveal not only the barriers of exclusion but also the practices of agency, resilience and resistance that reconfigure entrepreneurial possibilities in Sweden's paradoxical ecosystem.

Our study contributes to inclusive entrepreneurship literature by further underscoring the importance of both individual-level strategies and structural interventions. It challenges the assumption that formal equality translates into lived inclusion. Theoretically, our contributions are twofold. Firstly, by linking intersectionality's structural critique with TP's attention to mobility and context, it reframes inclusion not as a static state or policy outcome, but as a process of continual negotiation between actors, institutions and identities (Oliveira et al., 2024; Strawser et al., 2021). Intersectionality explains why inequalities persist, while TP reveals how actors navigate and re-signify them. Secondly, it expands the conceptual framework of emancipatory entrepreneuring (Rindova et al., 2009) to contexts where exclusion persists beneath the surface of equality, by illustrating how marginalized actors simultaneously reproduce, resist and reconfigure the very systems that delimit them. These insights offer important implications for inclusive entrepreneurship theory and policy design in Sweden and beyond.

The remainder of the paper proceeds as follows. We first present the theoretical framework underpinning our study before outlining our methodological approach. The findings section presents the key themes identified. We then discuss these insights in relation to debates on inclusive entrepreneurship, before concluding with implications for theory, policy and practice.

Inclusive entrepreneurship has gained prominence in policy and research as a strategy to broaden participation in entrepreneurial activity and promote equitable growth by addressing the barriers faced by underrepresented groups (Pickernell et al., 2022; Rolle et al., 2020). European policy frameworks, including those in Sweden, increasingly present entrepreneurship as a tool for empowerment, integration and innovation (Holmquist and Sundin, 2021; Ahl and Marlow, 2021), but its effects are context-dependent and sometimes counterproductive when narrowly economized (Abosede and Onakoya, 2013; Hall et al., 2012). Despite this rhetoric of inclusion, persistent gendered and racialized inequalities remain evident in both entrepreneurial participation and outcomes (Alsos et al., 2010).

Similarly, mainstream entrepreneurship research continues to be shaped by white, masculine and western norms that define who is seen as legitimate or credible (Essers and Benschop, 2009; Martinez Dy, 2020). Women, migrants and racialized entrepreneurs are often positioned as “the Other”, lacking traits associated with the idealized entrepreneur, autonomy, competitiveness and risk-taking (Marlow et al., 2009; Chasserio et al., 2014). Recent work urges attention to heterogeneity and intersectional dynamics, noting that entrepreneurship can advance inclusion yet risks over-promising (Aluthgama-Baduge and Rajasinghe, 2022; Blackburn and Ram, 2006). Empirically, culture, ethnicity, gender and networks shape engagement and evaluation (Alexandre-LeClair, 2017; Owalla et al., 2021).

This paradox is particularly salient in Sweden, where strong welfare systems and progressive gender-equality policies coexist with enduring structural disparities (Ahl and Nelson, 2015). Scholars describe this as the Nordic paradox, a context where formal equality coexists with everyday exclusions (Borchorst and Siim, 2002, 2008). This paradox underscores the need for analytical frameworks that move beyond policy rhetoric to interrogate how inclusion is performed, positioned and experienced within entrepreneurial ecosystems.

Immigrant entrepreneurship plays an increasingly important role in Sweden's economy, with WIEs representing a growing yet underexplored group within the broader field of migrant entrepreneurship. As Sweden continues to experience high levels of immigration alongside persistent barriers to labour market integration, self-employment has become an important avenue for many migrants, especially women, to achieve economic participation and social inclusion (Ohlsson et al., 2012). Research shows that self-employed women migrants navigate complex social positions, often balancing limited access to local networks with transnational ties that can serve as alternative resources (Evansluong, 2016; Munkejord, 2017). Nevertheless, studies still treat migrants as a homogeneous group, overlooking differences between privileged and underprivileged entrepreneurs (Aygören, 2015; Webster and Haandrikman, 2017).

In Sweden, privilege can manifest in access to social and financial capital, language proficiency, and cultural proximity to dominant groups; factors that significantly affect entrepreneurial opportunities. Women from highly educated or western backgrounds may benefit from these forms of privilege, while racialized and non-European women often face compounded disadvantages stemming from racialization, discrimination and institutional blind spots (Mulinari and Neergaard, 2017). Therefore, even though Sweden's entrepreneurship policies have long been promoted as gender-equal and supportive of innovation and growth, empirical evidence reveals persistent oversights. In 7this article, we refer to these oversights as “ecosystem blind spots”, denoting systematic oversights that occur due to the inattention of ecosystem actors to practices that exclude and/or lack practices that might include women entrepreneurs, rather than a deliberate act of exclusion.

Building on critiques of the Nordic paradox, research on Swedish entrepreneurship policy shows that gender-equality commitments often translate into formally inclusive but operationally narrow support structures. Ahl et al. (2024) demonstrate how entrepreneurship and rural development policies that were narrowly oriented towards profit, scalability and male-dominated sectors, tended to bypass most women-owned businesses despite their substantial, multidimensional and indispensable contributions to their regions. Furthermore, the termination of dedicated women's entrepreneurship programmes in 2015 – replaced by under-resourced gender-mainstreaming approaches – effectively diluted targeted support while preserving the appearance of inclusivity.

Similarly, Ahl and Nelson's (2015) comparative study of Swedish and US policies and programmes over a period of two decades found that despite Sweden's family friendly welfare state, policy discourses continued to reinforce women's secondary status in society rather than challenge it. Women's entrepreneurship was routinely subordinated to economic objectives and positioned as “the other”, thus sustaining narratives of inadequacy or extraordinariness. These studies suggest that Swedish entrepreneurship policies continue to reproduce invisible exclusions within the ecosystem (Ahl et al., 2024).

Despite being framed as collaborative and inclusive (Stam, 2015), entrepreneurial ecosystems often obscure how power, hierarchy and norm-conformity shape participation and recognition (Alvedalen and Boschma, 2017). Ecosystems frequently privilege those aligning with dominant entrepreneurial norms, marginalizing others under the guise of inclusion (Ahl and Marlow, 2021; Henry and Marlow, 2014). An example from Oliveira et al. (2024) highlights tensions that underpin women's interactions with government support bodies as a result of their divergence from mainstream normative entrepreneurial orientations – underscoring the need for a more inclusive framework in institutional entrepreneurial spaces. Moreover, when equality is presumed to have been achieved, policy neglect follows and programmes targeting underrepresented groups are scaled back, leaving systemic barriers unaddressed (Dhaliwal, 1998; Ahl and Marlow, 2021). Tillmar et al. (2022) additionally show how global neo-liberal ideas are translated through national formal and informal institutions, producing gendered consequences for entrepreneurship. The ongoing marketization of welfare policies has shifted risk and responsibility to individuals while privileging large providers and often disadvantaging women-owned firms concentrated in feminized service sectors (Tillmar et al., 2022).

Integrating an intersectionality and TP lens into entrepreneurship research therefore allows for a more nuanced understanding of how systems of power, belonging and exclusion shape business creation and survival among WIEs. Such an approach highlights not only how certain identities enable smoother pathways into entrepreneurship, but also how others encounter structural barriers that constrain participation and success in Sweden's innovation-driven economy.

Intersectionality provides a critical lens for examining how systems of gender, ethnicity, class and migration status intersect to shape opportunity, constraint and belonging (Crenshaw, 1991; Holvino, 2010). Rather than treating these as separate or additive inequalities, intersectionality reveals their mutual constitution in producing uneven entrepreneurial participation and legitimacy (Marlow and Martinez Dy, 2018; Essers and Benschop, 2007). It exposes how women are differently positioned within multiple hierarchies of power, recognition and access (Essers et al., 2023) and highlights that exclusion operates not only materially but also symbolically, through discourses that normalize white, masculine entrepreneurial ideals and cast women, migrants and racialized groups as “others” (Martinez Dy, 2020).

However, scholars have increasingly emphasized the need to complement intersectionality's structural focus with attention to social location and mobility across contexts (Anthias, 2002, 2009). TP builds on intersectionality but reorients it from identity categories to locations within social spaces, emphasizing that belonging, exclusion and legitimacy are context-dependent, shifting across time, space and institutional arenas such as policy programmes, funding bodies, markets and family relations (Anthias, 2009). Bridging structure and agency: it conceptualizes social position as outcome and social positioning as process, enabling analysis of how actors are both shaped by and shape the contexts they inhabit (Anthias, 2002, 2009). This perspective shifts attention from who people are to where and how they are positioned, and what rights, resources or recognition such positions afford (Anthias, 2009; Martinez Dy et al., 2014). It foregrounds questions of legitimacy, who is authorized to speak and be believed, under what criteria, and with what consequences (Anthias, 2002; Staunæs, 2003).

In this framing, belonging is not a fixed attribute but a shifting, situated outcome that varies across organizational, experiential, intersubjective and representational arenas, integrating structure (position) with agency (positioning) (Anthias, 1998, 2018). Following Anthias (2018), we conceptualize substantive inclusion through three practical dimensions, participation, access and parity, which move beyond formal entry to interrogate whether actors can participate meaningfully, access resources and decision rights and achieve parity of standing in evaluative encounters. We also acknowledge that legitimacy and access are allocated and contested differently across spaces (Anthias, 2009; Villares-Varela and Essers, 2019). For example, the same entrepreneur may be celebrated as a diversity ambassador in a policy forum yet dismissed as a risky novice by investors, differences that reflect contextual allocations of positionality rather than personal deficits (Martinez Dy et al., 2014).

Building on the idea that entrepreneurship can be a means of resistance and transformation, the concept of emancipatory entrepreneuring views entrepreneurship as a process of breaking free from constraints and redefining one's position within social hierarchies (Rindova et al., 2009, 2022). While often applied to marginalized or resource-constrained regions, this framework is useful for illuminating subtle exclusions within “gender-equal” societies like Sweden. Whereas empowerment involves gaining access within existing systems, emancipation entails questioning and transforming those systems (Al-Dajani and Marlow, 2013; Alkhaled and Berglund, 2018). However, as scholars caution, entrepreneurship often delivers only bounded empowerment when deeper inequalities remain intact (Gill and Ganesh, 2007; Verduijn and Essers, 2013; Benali and Villesèche, 2023).

Using a TP lens, emancipation can be understood as the capacity to re-position oneself across multiple contexts of power and recognition. For WIEs in Sweden, emancipation therefore would involve navigating and reinterpreting positional constraints, transforming exclusionary spaces into sites of legitimacy and voice. This perspective highlights coping and identity work not as individual adjustments but as contextually situated acts of positional agency that both reproduce and contest ecosystem blind spots.

In summary, analysing Sweden's entrepreneurial ecosystem from intersectionality and TP perspectives allows us to show how inclusion and exclusion is experienced and negotiated by WIEs. Intersectionality captures the structural interlocking of social identities, while TP emphasizes the shifting and contextual nature of these positions across time and space. Combined with the notion of emancipatory entrepreneuring, this framework allows us to understand inclusive entrepreneurship as both a structural and a positional process, one that reflects ongoing struggles for legitimacy, belonging and recognition within ostensibly inclusive systems. Additionally, by focusing on the gendered entrepreneurship processes, it emphasizes the temporal and situated agency of WIEs (Oliveira et al., 2024; Strawser et al., 2021).

This study adopts a qualitative research design informed by a social constructionist perspective (Fletcher, 2007; Lindgren and Packendorff, 2009). We view entrepreneurship as socially and discursively produced in interaction with others and institutions; consequently, experiences of inclusion/exclusion are interpreted as contextually situated narratives rather than objective states. This stance is appropriate for the Special Issue focus on “what we don't know”, because it makes visible the lived, intersectional dynamics of inclusive/exclusive entrepreneurship that can be obscured by aggregate indicators.

Methodologically, we employed an abductive approach (Alvesson and Kärreman, 2007), iterating between the empirical material and relevant theory (intersectionality; TP; entrepreneurial ecosystems and emancipatory entrepreneuring). Abduction allowed us to refine sensitizing concepts while remaining open to surprising patterns around policy neglect, ecosystem blind spots, legitimacy work and coping.

We focused on Stockholm, Sweden's most diverse entrepreneurial hub with dense policy, investment and incubator infrastructures – an apt setting to examine the tension between inclusive policy rhetoric and lived exclusion. Seventeen semi-structured interviews were conducted with women entrepreneurs of diverse ethnic and migration backgrounds who were founders/co-founders operating ventures for at least 12 months beyond the start-up phase. Participants varied by sector, education, prior profession, family status and self/other-ascribed racialization (white/person of colour in the Swedish context). All interviews took place between April 2022 and March 2023.

We used purposeful snowball sampling (Noy, 2008) to recruit our target group – underrepresented entrepreneurs who are often cautious about research exposure. Initial contacts were achieved through women-focused enterprise networks and entrepreneurship events, and subsequent referrals broadened heterogeneity. Inclusion criteria required women founders or co-founders of ventures operating in Sweden for at least 12 months, and we excluded pre-revenue projects and corporate intrapreneurship. This sampling strategy ensured heterogeneity in ethnicity/migration background and sector. The sampling aim was not statistical generalization but analytical transferability to comparable contexts. Interviewing continued until thematic saturation – defined as absence of new first-order codes across two consecutive interviews – was reached. Table 1 summarizes participant characteristics.

Data were gathered from April 2022 to March 2023 through semi-structured interviews (60–80 min), conducted in person or via Zoom/Teams depending on participant preference and availability. Interviews were held in English or Swedish (or a mix), audio-recorded with consent and transcribed verbatim. The interview guide covered: (1) background and business profile; (2) motivations and venture development; (3) institutional barriers/supports (registration, finance, training, mentoring); (4) family/work–life interface; (5) identity/legitimacy in professional settings; (6) experiences of inclusion/exclusion; (7) ecosystem interactions; and (8) aspirations and future plans.

The interviews were translated to English for analysis. To protect meaning, we used back-referencing to audio, context notes and analyst memos to resolve ambiguous phrasing and culturally specific terms. Ethical approval was obtained from the Swedish Ethical Review Authority (Ref. 2022-03481-01; decision date: 9 August 2022). Participants received written information and provided informed consent. All records were anonymized, stored securely and reported to minimize identifiability (e.g. role/sector categories rather than names).

We conducted an abductive thematic analysis, combining manual coding with support from NVivo 14 to ensure traceability and transparency. NVivo's audit features (codebook versioning, node trees and memo logs) provided an exportable chain of evidence. Coding was conducted across four stages. At Stage 1, we undertook attribute coding to capture demographic and venture attributes (e.g. age, education, migration/ethnicity, sector, prior profession) to situate narratives and enable intersectional comparisons. Stage 2 comprised our structural/first-cycle coding guided by the interview protocol and prior literature on contextual barriers to entrepreneurship (e.g. Azmat, 2013), applying structural codes to segments on finance, networks, institutional encounters, support usage, exclusion, legitimacy and ecosystem touchpoints. At Stage 3, open coding and memoing was used to foreground participants' own terms – especially emotionally charged talk – related to belonging, difference, disappointment and resistance – while developing conjectures about policy neglect and ecosystem blind spots. Finally, at Stage 4, second-cycle coding and theme construction, iterative clustering of first-order codes into second-order themes and aggregate dimensions was undertaken (Table 2). For the entrepreneurs, themes crystallized around structural/symbolic constraints, legitimacy and identity work, and situated coping.

Throughout analysis, we cycled between data, memos and literature (intersectionality; TP; ecosystems; emancipatory entrepreneuring), tightening or revising our categories when the data/logic required it.

Our analytical strategy was devised to ensure credibility, dependability, transferability and confirmability (Lincoln and Guba, 1985). Credibility was ensured through careful sample selection, prolonged engagement during lengthy interviews, iterative clarifying and probing, and extensive analytical memoing – after interviews and during coding. Dependability was achieved through a documented audit trail (protocols, codebook versions, memo logs, NVivo exports) providing procedural transparency. Transferability was facilitated by thick contextual description (Swedish context; Stockholm ecosystem; participant diversity) and by reporting theme definitions and indicative quotes in Section 4, enabling assessment of relevance to other contexts. Confirmability was maintained through reflexive memoing and peer-debriefing with co-authors and peers to reduce idiosyncratic researcher bias. We also aligned reporting with COREQ (where applicable) for qualitative interviews, strengthening transparency on researcher characteristics, relationships and analysis.

The first author (and interviewer) identifies as a non-EU Arabic-speaking woman scholar conducting research and residing in Sweden. This positionality facilitated rapport with some participants, especially those with migrant backgrounds, and enabled culturally sensitive interviewing. At the same time, it may have shaped what was shared and how experiences were interpreted. We mitigated these risks through iterative memoing, discussions amongst our ethnically and nationally diverse author team (the second author identifies as a Black African woman scholar who has previously lived in Sweden for five years; while the third author identifies as a White British, UK-based woman scholar), careful attention to disconfirming evidence and explicit separation of descriptive coding from interpretive claims. We also adopted strategies to reduce deductive disclosure (pseudonyms, removing specific organizational identifiers), acknowledging the heightened visibility of minority women in Swedish entrepreneurial communities. Rather than treating positionality as a bias to be eliminated, we view it as an analytic resource that, when made transparent, enhances the credibility and depth of the findings.

For participants, entrepreneurship entry was neither uniform nor linear. It reflected classed survival needs and/or autonomy-seeking aspirations, negotiated through Sweden's institutional narratives of gender equality and the practical gatekeeping of markets and bureaucracy. Using an intersectional lens, we show how gender, ethnicity/migration background, age and class configured business starting points in distinct ways. A TP lens adds that these positions were not fixed: women moved between policy arenas, bureaucratic procedures, market encounters and community norms – re-positioning themselves in each “space” to claim legitimacy.

Several participants described necessity-led entry tied to classed vulnerability, caregiving and migration. For example, Yusra (Medical Technology) linked the origins of her entrepreneurial path to a long arc of single-parent responsibility and blocked re-entry into waged work. For Manal (Nutrition Consulting), entrepreneurship began as a survival strategy: “I didn't even know what it meant to be an entrepreneur … Many of the things I did were just to survive, especially when I was a young single mother”. For both, entrepreneurship emerged within intersecting gendered care burdens, classed precarity, and for Yusra, intersecting ageism; TP acknowledges the necessary movement between welfare/activation logics, the labour market and household economies.

Other trajectories were autonomy-oriented and rooted in intersecting gendered and vocational identities. Safya (Beauty Salon) narrated a craft-based path involving family-embedded informal skill formation and cultural capital, gendered care-roles and business ambition: “I really enjoy working for myself”, yet gendered time stretched business entry:

For others, experiences in employment spurred pathways to entrepreneurship. Nuha (Law Firm) located her business start-up in a constrained agency within employment: “I always had ideas at work, but I was never allowed to improve things … I felt strangled. That's when I realized I had to create something of my own”. By contrast, positive advocacy in employment helped Eva (Marketing Agency): “It was a white man who gave me the wings to fly … ‘You're too great for us, you have to start your own company.’ … I was 25. I didn't even have a business idea, I was just trying to live”. These accounts show how autonomy projects can be contingent on cross-positional endorsements that recalibrate who is “allowed” to enter.

Migration experiences and biographies also shaped readiness and routes to business entry. Huda (Healthcare Services) described the skills and perseverance acquired through having to learn a new language following migration: “When we came to Sweden, I cried every day because I didn't understand the language. My mother sat with a dictionary every night and learned Swedish with me”. By contrast, some participants emphasized the transnational continuity of their entrepreneurial disposition. For example, Sasha (Freelance Photography) explained: “Even back in Chicago, I sold jewellery on the side … It's just natural for me to get ideas and try them”. Across all participants' cases, TP captures how identity resources and professional histories can travel, and then be re-positioned, in Swedish institutional settings.

Family socialization and role models were also significant in participant narratives. For Dalal, Jessica and Vera, their mothers were a source of inspiration. Dalal (Social Impact Ventures) drew her mother's example in business: “My mother started her own business even though she didn't know how to do it … She showed me entrepreneurship is not only about money, but a way to have a livelihood and inclusion in society”. For other interviewees, youth visibility as racialized minorities had forged early awareness of positional difference: Samar (App Development) recalled, “We were like four or five girls wearing hijab in a school of thousands … We learned to be proud of who we are even if we were the only ones”. Hissa (App Development) explained how, at the same time, their teachers were enabling them by believing in and mentoring them. Consistent with this intersectional–translocational framing, these accounts show how supportive micro-structures can partially offset systemic marginality.

Across interviews, identity work was described as continuous, mobile and influenced by micro-contexts. The playing field was not level, highlighting the failures of equality policies over equity policies. As Manal reflected:

Huda also noted stereotype misrecognition, making strong self-presentation more fraught with difficulty: “People don't expect Iranian women to be strong, so they think it's a personality issue, not a cultural one”, and Samar described hybrid belonging: “I am both Swedish and Eritrean … we took the best of both cultures and made something new”. Micro-context (in this case, industry context) can also amplify who can plausibly “count” as a legitimate business entrant. Manal, for example, situated food/hospitality as racialized and feminized channels where immigrants are expected to occupy the “simplest jobs”: “They don't expect a woman like me to come in as the expert or the boss”. Inclusion is thus not secured by eligibility alone; it is enacted within context – and sometimes revoked – as women traverse institutional, social and market contexts that differentially recognize their claims.

In sum, women's entry points were shaped by intersectional configurations of class, gender, age and ethnicized status, and were translocationally negotiated across policy talk, bureaucratic tests and market expectations. Together, these dynamics reveal entry into entrepreneurship as a negotiated and uneven process rather than a uniform opportunity. For some, entrepreneurship began as a survival response and later stabilized into a project of autonomy; for others, vocational identity anchored entry but remained contingent on clearing capital and legitimacy thresholds. Sweden's narrative of “entrepreneurship for everyone” invites participation, yet who is recognized as a legitimate entrant is sorted through practices that are ostensibly neutral but experienced as differentially demanding – a manifestation of the ecosystem's blind spots and policy–practice gaps traced in subsequent sections.

Women entrepreneurs with migrant or minority backgrounds thus experience a persistent gap between policy rhetoric and everyday reality. National and regional initiatives are framed around equality and diversity, yet these promises frequently materialize as bureaucratic hurdles rather than practical enablers. From an intersectional perspective, such experiences reveal how gender, class and ethnicity combine to shape access to supposedly universal forms of support. Through the lens of TP, these women's accounts illuminate the constant movement required as they navigate between experiences of symbolic inclusion and material exclusion, different institutional locations, policy programmes, financial agencies and public procurement systems.

Safya's account highlights how policy instruments that claim inclusivity often redistribute adaptation work to the applicant, privileging those with high cultural and bureaucratic literacy:

Despite this work, Safya was not successful. This experience was common amongst participants. The policy language of empowerment and equality conceals a process of verification and surveillance through which inclusion must be continually justified. Sasha, who migrated from the USA, echoed this bureaucratic strain:

Such experiences show how even well-intentioned systems generate fear and mistrust when institutional guidance is inaccessible. They expose how “inclusive” programmes can reproduce what Anthias (2013) calls hierarchies of belonging: access depends not only on merit but on one's ability to perform “Swedish professionalism”. Indeed, some accounts also demonstrated how bureaucratic opacity and entrepreneur self-navigation create differential vulnerability, particularly for migrants without Swedish institutional literacy. Inclusion in Sweden is often procedural, with little available guidance – granting formal access but withholding embedded support.

In addition, for some participants, experiences of tokenistic visibility, extractive inclusion and exploitation were both a frustration and an impediment. They remarked that inclusion felt more symbolic than substantive. As Samar noted, “sometimes I feel they want our stories more than our businesses, they love the idea of the immigrant girl who succeeded, but not always enough to invest”. Across these narratives, diversity is commodified for institutional storytelling but rarely translated into structural redistribution. Dalal described this dynamic as infantilizing: “People have treated me like ‘poor little girl,’ like a diversity card in a boardroom rather than someone they actually believe in”. These accounts demonstrate symbolic inclusion without material support, where women's difference is celebrated as spectacle but disqualified as economic competence. From a TP perspective, this tokenism leaves women in these spaces with few legitimate scripts or identities to perform.

Indeed, inequality under the guise of meritocracy is arguably more difficult to navigate than explicit discrimination. For participants, network blindness and credibility gaps further undermined formal equality. Hissa explained these cumulative hurdles:

Such accounts demonstrate how legitimacy is still filtered through gendered, classed and racialized scripts that reward proximity to dominant norms. In TP terms, women must continually re-position themselves – linguistically, aesthetically and relationally – to claim professional recognition within ostensibly meritocratic fields.

Even when women succeed in entering the market, inequalities, in institutional and sectoral structures, can devalue their work. Huda observed that the Government sets prices for (feminized) healthcare services very low, by contrast to male-dominated construction services. Dalal noted gendered evaluation bias:

Such statements reveal how undervaluation of feminized labour and assumptions about motherhood constrain women's growth potential. Intersectionally, such experiences highlight how gender and sector intersect with ethnicity to produce compounded forms of economic marginalization. The rules for belonging and legitimacy are negotiated hyper-locally but also nested in layers of rules at broader scales (workplace, sector, city, region, country) and cross-cut by intersectional positionality.

Referring to the national scale, participants frequently problematized the national narrative of gender equality as a rhetorical mask that conceals uneven realities and systemic blindness. Huda explained that the Nordic equality myth is

Further, Vera (Photography Studio) underscored the unequal hierarchy of migration capital: “If I had come from Ghana instead of France, it would probably have been harder. People don't see France as ‘foreign’ here”. This reflection surfaces a racialized hierarchy of “Europeanness”, where some forms of foreignness convert more readily into credibility than others. Together, participants' reflections unmasked the equality narrative as a form of discursive closure – silencing critique by framing inequality as individual failure rather than structural exclusion. At the same time, several women expressed gratitude for Sweden's relative safety and rights, even while critiquing its exclusions. Eva captured this tension poignantly:

Her statement illustrates the affective complexity of negotiating freedom within constrained structures – an example of translocational ambivalence, where belonging is both emancipatory and conditional.

In sum, these findings reveal the ecosystem's inherent biases and blind spots: inclusion is institutionally promised but materially conditional. Intersectionality exposes how the burden of adaptation is unevenly distributed across gendered, ethnicized and classed lines, while TP clarifies how women must continuously re-locate themselves between credibility and suspicion, representation and exclusion, gratitude and critique, across varying nested contexts, to sustain participation in an ecosystem that remains formally open but substantively constrained.

While inclusion policies in Sweden celebrate entrepreneurship as open to all, the practice of being recognized as a “legitimate” entrepreneur is choreographed through norms of language, demeanour and cultural presentation. Legitimacy is not neutral; it is negotiated through performative labour and shaped by gendered, ethnicized, classed and age-coded expectations of who looks, and sounds, entrepreneurial. Viewed through an intersectional lens, participants reveal how conformity to Swedish professional codes (calm affect, restrained self-presentation, impeccable Swedish) functions as an unspoken requirement of belonging. From a TP perspective, legitimacy emerges as continual movement (code-switching) – learning when to appear “Swedish”, when to invoke difference, and how to shuffle between these positionalities across rooms, roles and audiences.

Participants repeatedly described code-switching as credibility-labour, which involved strategic modulation to pre-empt doubt. As Hissa put it, “Sometimes I have to be less immigrant and more professional, you know, speak perfect Swedish, dress Swedish, be calm and not too emotional”. To the contrary, Manal spoke of the gender and ethinicized barriers she experienced when asserting expertise, and Yusra named a persistent issue with speaking with a “different” accent. These practices exemplify the affective and linguistic “tidying up” that racialized women undertake to “stick to the script” and be read as competent but not intimidating – an intersectional credibility tax that is paid upfront and repeatedly.

Indeed, gendered norms inflect how confidence is read. Manal noted: “If a man did what I do, people would call him ambitious. For a woman, it's ‘too much’”. Huda also captured the tyranny of hegemonic femininities: “I speak perfect Swedish, I dress Swedish, I act Swedish, but I'm also very direct and demanding. Some men don't like that … In Iran, being outspoken means you're competent”. In these examples, intersectionality between gender and race/ethnicity amplifies these judgments – directness, admired in men, and to a lesser extent – majority women, becomes “difficult” when performed by racialized women. Legitimacy is also self-consciously performed through aesthetic and narrative control. Eva described tactical humility as an entry strategy: “If I have to bring coffee to get into the room, I'll bring the coffee. Once they trust me … then I get respect”. Here, being seen and not seen becomes an advantage. TP helps interpret these manoeuvres as conscious re-positionings between visibility (to claim space) and invisibility (to observe and learn power's rules and language).

Indeed, several participants redefined belonging as occupying spaces that historically exclude them. As Eva explained: “The ‘room’ for me is any place I'm not supposed to be – boardroom, university, business event … I don't care if they call me an idiot or a clown – I'm in the room”. On the other hand, Jessica narrated self-exposure in uncomfortable spaces as growth, and others, like Eva, reframed visibility as resistance. Further, Jamila (Software Development) recounted how she embraced potentially uncomfortable hyper-visibility as brand capital: “We don't hide who we are. A female Asian entrepreneur in the north – people want to hear the story”. These accounts exemplify TP's “spatial re-positioning” – moving into, and reshaping rooms that confer legitimacy. Visibility becomes a resource – a form of embodied critique within spaces that otherwise normalize homogeneity. The accounts also reveal the relentless intersectional identity work that is required for these strategic interventions and performances.

Participants also discussed how they leverage difference as a capital, whilst simultaneously exercising caution. For example, Samar highlighted her translingual capital, and Nuha (Law Firm) had turned stigma into niche legitimacy:

Interpreted through the lens of TP's “strategic oscillation”, we witness switching between community authenticity and Swedish professionalism to align with shifting audiences and sites.

Finally, several women described how they performed authority through competence. As Huda explained: “When I negotiate, I'm very precise. I expect people to deliver what they promised. Some find that hard because I'm a woman, but I just call it professionalism”, whilst Jamila (Software Development) used role definition to pre-empt the challenge: “I call myself a system designer, hard skills make it harder to question my competence”. All these moves reclaim the criteria of legitimacy from personality and accent to business values and measurable performance.

Across all participant testimonies, legitimacy is not a status bestowed once but an ongoing negotiation, performed, policed and re-performed across linguistic, aesthetic and moral registers. Intersectionality clarifies why some must perform more self-consciously and precisely than others; TP explains how these women tactically re-locate themselves – between conformity and difference, presence and concealment, humility and assertion – to claim belonging.

Amid unequal access, cultural mistrust and recurring exclusions, women entrepreneurs assembled a repertoire of coping strategies that move beyond code-switching and endurance towards active re-positioning. Inclusion is thus not simply received; it is continually produced through women's adaptive and resistant practices. Intersectionally, these strategies vary with class, migration stage, motherhood status, age and social capital. Through the lens of TP, coping appears as mobility across sites – women tactically shift positions between markets, policy arenas, professional networks and community spaces to sustain agency, claim legitimacy and recast the rules of belonging.

One strategy of re-positioning explained by participants was the building of new ecosystems of belonging to offset the under-delivering mainstream institutional structures. Participants spoke of forming their own support and business networks. Hissa spoke of the collective demand for rights: “We're used to fighting for our rights … No one will do it for you, you have to do it yourself”. Collectives here were both vertical and lateral moves: instead of continually seeking validation “upward”, women created new sites of belonging and agency where their value is primary. Self-determination also scaled outward into ecosystem contribution through mentorship and advocacy. Jessica explained that she wanted “… to mentor other expat women … help them start something of their own”. These are moves from survival to redesign – women not only adapt to the ecosystem; they begin to re-make it.

Ecosystem re-making was also performed through subversion. Participants reported subverting tokenistic invitations and calls upon them for “performative visibility”. They deliberately changed the scripts expected of them. As Manal explained, “now when they invite me just to show diversity, I still go, but I speak the truth. I use their stage to say what they don't want to hear”. Ultimately, these actions were not just about their own belonging but that of future generations and wider communities: “I'm motivated by the injustices I see … we must build the future we want for our kids” (Dalal). These women can be understood as operating both inside and against dominant structures: being present on the stage while re-coding its rules and messaging.

For many, coping matured into detaching legitimacy from gatekeepers and pursuing the freedom to work to one's own time schedules, work preferences and priorities. There was talk of freedom and work-family balance, and Nuha (Law Firm) explained that she valued freedom over material wealth – “I would be richer if I worked for a big firm, but I don't care about the money. I want freedom”, whilst Eva remarked that “Freedom is success” and she credited Swedish welfare infrastructures for off-setting her single mom status and enabling her business. A TP lens highlights participants' agency to enact temporal re-positioning – that is – controlling when and how to labour as a core metric of thriving. These examples also underscore how intersecting gender and parental status – as well as institutional infrastructures – condition the feasibility of entrepreneurship, especially in the absence of local family networks.

Across all participants, we have seen that coping is experienced as a dynamic, situated agency. Intersectionality explains why some must work harder and adapt more, and at greater cost; TP reveals how women move – linguistically, socially, temporally and spatially – between conformity and critique, individual hustle and collective redesign. Through strategic adaptation, emotional resilience, symbolic resistance and micro-ecosystem building, they sustain ventures and subtly re-script the field. Coping thus becomes both survival and transformation – the everyday labour through which inclusion is negotiated and achieved – and its falsities are exposed.

Adopting the lenses of intersectionality and TP, we explored how women entrepreneurs of diverse ethnic backgrounds in Sweden experience and navigate a policy environment that proclaims inclusivity yet reproduces exclusion. Our findings illuminate inclusive entrepreneurship as a process of situated negotiation rather than a stable policy outcome (Figure 1). Inclusion is not simply achieved through access or visibility; it is continuously produced – and contested – through women's everyday efforts to perform legitimacy, cope with exclusion and build alternative infrastructures of belonging. In doing so, this study responds directly to calls for more nuanced, process-oriented accounts of inclusion (Strawser et al., 2021).

Our first theme is that inclusion is bounded and unequal. There is a persistent gap between Sweden's discursive equality and material inequality. Policies framed around gender neutrality and universal access reproduce what Ahl and Marlow (2021) call the “false promise” of entrepreneurship, where the burden of adaptation is shifted onto individuals. Despite strong welfare systems and gender-equality narratives in Sweden, similar to Ahl and Nelson (2015), we find that WIEs remain positioned at the periphery of entrepreneurial legitimacy. Through an intersectional lens, these exclusions are not additive but co-constructed – gendered ideals of professionalism intertwine with racialized and classed hierarchies of credibility. And as participants explained, inclusion often came with work attached and professional recognition was tethered to racialized/gendered appearances. These dynamics exemplify bounded inclusion: women may enter formal programmes, yet their belonging remains conditional. The Swedish equality ideal, while laudable, functions as a discursive closure, a rhetorical space that deflects structural critique by presenting equality as already achieved.

The second theme is policy inconsistency/ “policy neglect” (Dhaliwal, 1998), a context where programmes exist, yet access and impact remain unevenly distributed (Ahl et al., 2024). WIEs' experiences reveal that inclusion policies often operate as managerial instruments rather than supportive relational practices. The system assumes equal procedural capacity (capacity to engage with and “work” the system), while disregarding linguistic, cultural and informational asymmetries. TP explains why these ecosystem blind spots persist. Institutional policy occupies inconsistent and shifting imperatives – between growth mandates, equality targets and resource constraints. Positional movement between these imperatives produces inconsistencies between discourse and delivery. WIEs, in turn, experience these inconsistencies as translocational disjunctures – moments where belonging is affirmed symbolically but denied materially.

Our analysis extends current debates on legitimacy in entrepreneurship (e.g. Clarke and Holt, 2019) by demonstrating its affective and aesthetic dimensions (third theme). For WIEs, legitimacy is performed and negotiated rather than granted. It requires mastering the codes of “Swedish professionalism” – calm speech, restrained emotion and impeccable language. Through an intersectional lens, this performance constitutes a credibility tax. Women must continuously manage impressions to pre-empt doubt. Such affective regulation constitutes the labour of belonging, sustained at psychological and temporal cost. TP reframes these performances as positional manoeuvres. WIEs strategically oscillate between conformity and self-expression – between “speaking perfect Swedish” to reassure investors and invoking cultural difference to attract niche markets. This mobility reveals belonging as situational and reversible; one can be “in the room”, yet be perpetually required to prove why one deserves to stay there. Furthermore, the findings nuance postfeminist narratives of individual empowerment. Rather than freely choosing self-presentation, participants navigate gendered and racialized scripts that define professionalism itself. When Manal noted that assertiveness in men is “ambition” but in women “too much”, she exposed the gendered double bind within Sweden's ostensibly egalitarian work culture. Legitimacy is thus morally coded: women are tolerated as competent only if they remain emotionally contained.

The paper conceptualizes coping, not as passive endurance, but as situated agency (fourth theme) – that is – the everyday acts through which WIE sustain ventures and navigate exclusionary systems. This builds on Rindova et al.’s (2009, 2022) notion of emancipatory entrepreneuring. Initially, coping takes the form of strategic adaptation – learning linguistic and cultural cues to gain entry. Yet, as exclusion persists, women move towards symbolic – and sometimes, collective – resistance. These lateral moves represent what Anthias (2009) terms “horizontal mobility” – building new sites of recognition rather than chasing validation from inaccessible power centres. Such an agency is deeply intersectional. Class and welfare access mediate its feasibility. At the same time, coping remains unevenly distributed. Those with higher education or Swedish partners navigate bureaucracies more easily, and others rely on emotional resilience to offset structural fragility. TP adds nuance by conceptualizing coping as movement across spaces and scales. WIE's agency unfolds through multiple re-locations between market and family, national and transnational arenas, visible advocacy and backstage organizing. Speaking truth “on their stage”, as Manal put it, embodies translocational resistance: using inclusionary invitations to voice dissent from within.

The fifth theme lies in exposing temporal autonomy as a redefinition of entrepreneurial success. Across cases, WIEs reframed freedom – control over time, pace and emotional energy – as the ultimate measure of legitimacy. This temporal reframing resonates with feminist critiques of narrowly conceived growth-centric metrics (Ahl and Marlow, 2021) and aligns with the emancipatory entrepreneuring literature emphasizing success as self-determination over scalability (Rindova et al., 2009, 2022). It also builds on existing studies (Oliveira et al., 2024; Strawser et al., 2021) by shedding light on the temporal and situated agency of WIEs. From a translocational standpoint, these temporal choices signal a re-positioning in time: rather than aspiring to accelerate within mainstream success scripts – women choose to slow down, re-sequence or re-prioritize. Freedom here is not withdrawal from work but a re-embedding of work within life (Ekinsmyth, 2014). Such agency challenges neoliberal logics that equate inclusion with relentless productivity, showing instead that sustainable inclusion may require temporal justice, the right to pace, pause and balance.

Integrating intersectionality and TP reveals that inclusion is not a binary state – inside or outside – but an unstable trajectory of mobility. WIE's stories show constant re-location between visibility and erasure, gratitude and critique, dependence and autonomy. These positional shifts are simultaneously enabled and constrained by Sweden's institutional architecture: welfare systems create safety nets but also embed bureaucratic control; equality discourse legitimizes participation but disciplines dissent. By tracing these shifts, we advance an understanding of inclusive entrepreneurship as positional practice – a field of movement where actors continually negotiate belonging under unequal conditions. Intersectionality grounds the analysis in power and structure; TP captures how agency materializes through navigation, translation and re-location. Together, they reveal inclusion as an unfinished project, enacted through both compliance and contestation.

The findings call for a fundamental rethinking of how inclusion is operationalized in Sweden's entrepreneurial ecosystem. We make the following recommendations, which are achievable across differing timeframes and rely upon government policy/funding and resulting actions to change mindsets. Firstly, and in common with many in this field, we conclude and propose that revolutionary change is needed to redefine societal assumptions around who can, and should be, an entrepreneur. Policies aimed at equality of access must be matched by those directed at equality of recognition and parity of legitimacy. WIEs need to be expected “in the room”, their legitimacy needs to be a given. This requires a concerted political will and policy directed at public education, discourse change and a corresponding altering of mindsets at the societal level.

Our second recommendation is to examine institutional architectures from the standpoint of diverse users so that hidden blind spots, barriers and inequalities can be uncovered and resolved. Our findings indicate that bureaucratic, self-service processes need to be re-designed into relational forms of (peopled) support that build trust – including mentoring that opens networks, advising that is culturally competent and guidance that helps newcomers navigate opaque rules without fear. This requires funding and training staff who are accessible and attuned to the fact that bureaucratic and business environments are uneven and that WIE access challenges reflect systemic barriers rather than applicant shortcomings.

Thirdly, the emotional and aesthetic labour WIEs expend needs to be read as legitimate – the code-switching, accent management and affective “tidying up” – should be recognized as an invisible contribution to ecosystem vitality rather than a private burden. To achieve this, peer-led and community-rooted networks should be resourced as core infrastructure, not treated as peripheral “special interests”, because they can provide the micro-ecologies of belonging and support that institutional programmes routinely miss.

Finally, entrepreneur ecosystem actors need training that surfaces their own positionality and reveals how everyday scripts – selection criteria, pitch formats and procurement routines – reproduce the exclusions they aim to solve. Embedding this reflexivity alongside clear accountability mechanisms would move the system beyond symbolic gestures towards substantive parity, where inclusion is measured not only by who gets through the door, but by whose competence and claims are granted equal standing once inside.

As with all qualitative research, this study has limitations that should be acknowledged. Firstly, the sample size and focus on WIEs in Stockholm limit statistical generalizability; however, our aim is analytical transferability to comparable entrepreneurial ecosystems rather than representativeness. Secondly, the sampling strategy focused on established WIEs who had successfully navigated the entrepreneurial ecosystem and thus does not include those whose enterprises might not have survived. Future studies, focusing on failed ventures, could provide additional insights. Thirdly, the interviews were conducted during a period shaped by post-pandemic recovery, which may have influenced participants' experiences of uncertainty and institutional interaction. These limitations do not detract from the study's contribution but rather define the scope within which the findings should be interpreted. Lastly, as the study focuses on WIE's perceptions and positionality, future research that takes into account ecosystem-actor perspectives and positionalities would build on these results by providing a range of institutional viewpoints.

In combining intersectionality and TP, this paper introduces an integrated structural-positional framework for studying inclusion. Intersectionality explains why inequalities persist; TP reveals how actors navigate and re-signify them. Together, they foreground mobility, context and reflexivity as analytical anchors for inclusive entrepreneurship research. These lenses clarify how WIEs navigate Sweden's self-declared inclusive entrepreneurial ecosystem. Despite Sweden's global reputation for gender equality and progressive welfare policy, inclusion remains uneven, conditional and continuously negotiated; equality on paper rarely translates into legitimacy or recognition in practice. Participants' experiences expose the Nordic paradox: an ecosystem that promises inclusion but redistributes the work of adaptation onto those it claims to empower. Entrepreneurial legitimacy is not granted but performed – through language, affect, dress and demeanour aligned with unspoken norms of “Swedish professionalism”. These performances, while enabling participation, also reproduce hierarchies of belonging, marking racialized and migrant women as perpetual outsiders. Intersectionality illuminates how gender, ethnicity, class and migration interlock to create differentiated burdens of adaptation, while TP reveals the dynamic, context-specific strategies through which women continually re-position themselves across institutional and social spaces.

Within these constraints, WIE's agency is neither passive nor merely adaptive. The findings reveal a shift from strategic conformity towards collective re-positioning and symbolic resistance. Women learn to “speak the codes” of the ecosystem, while building parallel infrastructures – peer networks, advocacy initiatives and role-modelling practices – that sustain participation where institutional support falls short. These micro-ecosystems of belonging constitute acts of everyday emancipation, enabling women to rebuild legitimacy on their own terms and reimagine inclusion in practice. Conceptually, this study advances inclusive entrepreneurship research by linking intersectionality's structural critique with TP's attention to mobility and context, reframing inclusion as an ongoing negotiation between actors, institutions and identities. In doing so, it contributes to the literature on emancipatory entrepreneuring by illustrating how marginalized actors simultaneously reproduce, resist and reconfigure the systems that delimit them. For policymakers and ecosystem actors, this calls for moving beyond formal equality frameworks towards positional inclusion – through equity-centred policies that ensure recognition, belonging and legitimacy access. Embedding reflexivity in ecosystem design, fostering relationships of trust and supporting community-led networks are tangible steps towards parity of standing. Ultimately, Sweden's entrepreneurial ecosystem stands at a crossroads. Its promise of “entrepreneurship for all” will remain aspirational unless symbolic inclusion is coupled with structural redistribution and reflexive accountability. Finally, wider literature shows that our respondents' experiences are not exceptional or restricted to the Swedish context. Instead, they resonate with accounts from women entrepreneurs around the world. Our recommendations are thus pertinent, and transferable, to other national contexts.

We confirm that all authors have agreed to the submission and that the article is not currently being considered for publication by any other journal.

The author would like to thank the study participants for generously sharing their experiences and insights. The author also appreciates the valuable comments and suggestions provided by the editors and anonymous reviewers during the review process. Any remaining errors are the sole responsibility of the author.