Source: French to English Tester Published on: 2026-03-30
Source: The Conversation – France (in French)– By Julie Tixier, Associate Professor in Management Sciences, Gustave Eiffel University
Far from clichés and uplifting stories of heroic entrepreneurs, the examination of the journeys of two women shows on the contrary that the process is not linear. Through successive crises, Claire and Fatou assert themselves throughout the process, proving that “one is not born an entrepreneur, one becomes one.”
Whether it is climatic, economic, or health-related, the crisis would primarily affect women. Indeed, women represent70% of working poorand, according to the United Nations, in the face of climate crises, women would be fourteen times more likely to die than men, mainly becauseof limited access to “information, restricted mobility, lack of decision-making and resources”.
However, some women sometimes seize certain of these unstable moments through entrepreneurship. The paths followed over several years by Fatou and Claire (the first names have been changed, editor’s note), two female entrepreneurs, are mobilized to go beyond the sole objective, linear, and extrinsic reading of the crisis. These journeys are analyzed in more detailin an article of the journalRIMHE.
The feminine and feminist approach of this research“embraces forms of theorization that are more human, more fluid and more open, anchored in questions that are truly close to us (…) and that recognize our anchoring in our world and our responsibility towards others”. This phenomenological stance captures“The living experience of the world”of two unique entrepreneurs. It leads to trying to understand the meanings, the logics, and the sense of the experienced, observed elements.
This approach guided us to closely reflect the feelings and journeys of women in their entirety: factual, emotional, relational. The fine granularity of the study of these two narratives allows exploring the richness of a Deleuzian reading of entrepreneurship in the making and illustrating a “becoming entrepreneur” that is in line with whatDeleuze and Guattari defined as the “becoming woman”.
By adopting a longitudinal methodology, this research highlights how it is possible to cope with, or even transcend, crises and to build oneself in relation to them.
Entrepreneurial identity under construction
Crises regularly appear in their lives. Claire and Fatou describe how each crisis can be the source of insecurity, instability, and thus initiate a diagnosis, lead to reflection, or even to an evolution of identity and/or the entrepreneurial project. These are as many turbulences and encounters which, depending on the moment in the entrepreneur’s history, may or may not lead to a resonance that will more or less durably guide entrepreneurial practices and the construction of entrepreneurial identity.
“I was in a period where I was thinking that it would be interesting to start a business, but it was really the meeting with my partner and the fact that it was the right time for me to say, ‘Come on, let’s go!”
(Claire.)
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For her part, during a Master’s 2, Fatou carries out a group project on innovative intergenerational housing in an open environment for Alzheimer’s cases, in a “human-scale” house. For this woman who is pursuing studies after ten years of professional life as a social worker, it is a time of break to devote herself to what she holds dear. It is this university work that will resonate with her desire to undertake work on an inclusive model for elderly people.
To each their trigger
Fatou is the only one in her group wishing to work towards the realization of such a project. She chooses to research and adapt her project to her more urban environment. At the same time, she takes the opportunity to become a student-entrepreneur to benefit from coaching. At the end of her Master’s degree in social and solidarity economy, Fatou decides to enroll in a new Master’s degree, specialized in entrepreneurship (work-study program), in order to do everything possible for her project.
Claire is an executive, purchasing director of a large group, when she discovers the portrait of a project leader with an impact in a magazine committed to ecology. This chance discovery plants the seed, opening her path towards entrepreneurship. The testimony of this woman who is her age and seems to share with her a set of values “speaks” to her.
At the time of this reading, she knows that she will soon have to leave her position to follow her husband, who has been transferred to a new region. After discussing it, the couple made this delicate family decision to move, despite the lack of professional opportunities for Claire within her company in this new place of residence.
Online contacts
It is in this uncertain context that she strives to facilitate the meeting with this impact-driven project holder. With just a few clicks, Claire identifies the incubator of this entrepreneur and her contact details. She reaches out to her and, shortly after their first phone conversation, the two women form a partnership. The region in which Claire’s family settles quickly proves to be promising for her entrepreneurial project. It offers a welcoming territory in which to establish her business.
Claire is in the region, and her partner is in Paris. This dual leadership management gets used to the geographical distance and even quickly turns it into an advantage to distribute each person’s tasks. What initially appears to be a professional crisis (no position at the same level available in her husband’s new work location) is turned by Claire into an opportunity. She decides to embark on a new professional adventure and open the door to entrepreneurship.
The crisis, a decisive moment for a self-assessment
For Fatou as for Claire, one realizes that the intention to undertake takes shape after a crisis, a decisive moment, filled with doubts and instabilities and, simultaneously, conducive to self-diagnosis: training for one, forced geographic mobility for the other. The crisis is the spark that fuels the entrepreneurial fire. Both allow the signals they read and/or hear to resonate loudly enough to become part of their journey and set them into action. Claire summarizes it in these terms:
“I certainly had my ears open a bit on this type of subject!”
They let this resonance echo, spread, grow, and thus shape their idea of undertaking and becoming an entrepreneur. The crisis appears in the paths of Fatou and Claire as multiple.
An internal upheaval
During a “hackathon” (innovation contest with limited time, editor’s note), work-study students, often returning to studies, are working on Fatou’s project. Their professional knowledge of the sector and its imperatives is put to use over three days. Fatou measures the importance of this advice, and one can physically perceive the internal upheaval in Fatou as she absorbs the shock of the influx of elements to consider.
The feedback from students, particularly regarding funding application schedules, potential locations, subsidies, and operating budget, are all elements that propel her into a different scope of her project. Very quickly, she analyzes and reconfigures her project based on the information provided and progresses significantly in her approach. She turns to us, stunned, and confides:
“They saved me two years in my project!”
She is fully aware of the value of these meetings and wishes to multiply them continuously. A few months later, thanks to a meeting with the mayor of a neighboring town, she was able to find the house that now hosts her project and began the work to develop the place.
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An identity that asserts itself
Fatou presented herself as an entrepreneur on three occasions to three different groups of students. Each time, we clearly observed an evolution in her posture as an entrepreneur. She introduces herself to the students, the first time as a former student, then increasingly as an entrepreneur. Through the structuring exercise of the entrepreneurial pitch, Fatou asserts her identity as an entrepreneur and gains confidence in this new role.
Several months after Claire started her entrepreneurial journey, her husband lost his job. The family then found themselves in a new region, where they had moved for a job that no longer exists. After the shock of the news, Claire found certain advantages in this period of her husband’s inactivity. She discovered managing a business without the pressure of daily tasks, which had been completely delegated to her husband:
“When you don’t have anything else to do, you can make progress, it’s easy.”
During this period, she recruits and grows the team that supports her in the region.
Entrepreneurship, an emotional work
More than the crisis itself, this analysis shows that it is what one makes of it along the way that matters. The study, in a few key stages of the journeys of these two entrepreneurs, illustrates the necessity of better observing and accounting for the emotional labor, the processing of the crisis, the diagnosis that underlies entrepreneurship as it unfolds. Far from being exceptional, crises prove to be recurrent, as soon as the researcher zooms out and considers the entrepreneurial journey in its dynamic.
We present a trajectory that deals with crises, adapts to them, and sometimes transcends them. The crises, of varying intensity and nature, mark the journey, and some contribute to enriching it. The inscription of crises in a sensitive, subjective context over a long period allows for understanding the importance of their resonance as a transformative element.
Sometimes foundational, sometimes incremental, the crisis can largely contribute to shaping entrepreneurship as it is unfolding. It creates a recurring breach that pushes one to move forward, to build and to build oneself as a female entrepreneur. Throughout the entrepreneurial journey, women business leaders perform and progressively refine their entrepreneurial identity. The notion of crisis as encounter, in the Deleuzian sense, with this “outside, something that disrupts established thought patterns” » is revisited here in the light of the identity in the making, and of a becoming entrepreneur.
The authors do not work for, do not advise, do not own shares in, do not receive funds from any organization that could benefit from this article, and have declared no affiliation other than their research institution.
–ref. Listening to the echo of crises in the life journeys of two female entrepreneurs: discovering the impact of a sensitive long-term reading –https://theconversation.com/listen-resonate-crises-in-the-life-paths-of-two-entrepreneurs-discovering-the-impact-of-sensitive-long-term-reading-264379