Gendered Corporatization: The Efficacy of the One Person Company as a Vehicle for Women’s Entrepreneurial Emancipation

Abstract

These days, the intersection of corporate jurisprudence, macroeconomic policy, and gender has become a quintessential site of scholarship, unsettling the long-held presumption that legal rules regulating the corporate form are value-neutral. For many years, the core building blocks of corporate law ranging from the corporate separation of ownership and control to the foundational doctrine of limited liability have been examined with a narrow, neoclassical economic setup, one that has for long overlooked the gendered relations that influences the formation of capital, sharing of risk, and governing of the modern corporation. The last few decades Yet have seen the advent of an earnest corporate law scholarship committed to unraveling that alleged neutrality. This literature highlights the structural exclusion, institutional biases, and embedded network of sociopolitical relations that have historically underpinned differential access for men and women to corporate ownership and positions of power. Against this complex scenario of knowledge and praxis, the formalization of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) stands out as a critical frontier of women's economic emancipation. On a global level, female enterprise is considered not only as a matter of moral sphere for equality of gender, but also as a matter of macroeconomic survival, as it is directly linked to the goal of uninterrupted innovation, employment generation and systemic growth. But, the available pathways for women to formalize their business activities have long been far too restricted. Female entrepreneurs have traditionally been "pushed" into home-based solo entrepreneurship, which exposes them to full personal liability in business affairs, or "pulled" into complex, multi-member corporate arrangements, which require large amounts of capital, involve intricate regulator-entrepreneur interactions and imply the difficult task of finding co-founders.

Keywords: company, gender, dignity, protection, technology