In this paper we study policy development for women’s entrepreneurship in Sweden. Since Sweden is consistently ranked as one of the most gender equal in the whole word it should be expected to take a leading position in this area. We look at policy over a 20-year period, from its inception in 1993, using official policy documents as well as interviews with leading officials as our data. Despite that several policy programmes to support women’s entrepreneurship have been implemented not much seems to have happened with regards to increasing the number of women entrepreneurs’. We employ Nancy Frasers (2003) theory of recognition /redistribution to ask what premises women’s entrepreneurship policy builds on, what are its effects for gender equality, how has this changed over time and how is the change related to European policy changes in a neo-liberal direction.
Western forms of entrepreneurship have evolved hand in hand with neoliberal market logics aspiring to create self-regulating citizens (Lemke, 2001). This co-production of a self-regulating life form and a constant ambition to optimize what became “the economic sphere” as we understand it today, emerged with 18-19th century liberal philosophy (Foucault, 2004); a philosophy that problematized individual freedom in relation to state rule. Freedom was defined as ‘freedom from’ sovereign structures. Analysing policy for women’s entrepreneurship as a shift from redistribution to recognition we discuss how ‘freedom to be entrepreneurial’ has been rationalized as a power for women to gain freedom. Hence, we seek to advance the theory of redistribution/ recognition through elaborating the concept of the enterprising self.
