Emma Wainwright Elodie Marandet Centre for Human Geography, Brunel University, London

1. “Start off by working at home and then later on develop it into a bigger business”: training for body work and aspirations for entrepreneurship Emma Wainwright Elodie Marandet Centre for Human Geography, Brunel University, London

2. Outline • Policy and conceptual context • Mothers, training for work and up-skilling • Entrepreneurship and gender • The research • The gendering of body work • ‘Body training’ project details • Aspirations for entrepreneurship • Motivations for body work/ entrepreneurship • Financial independence and control • Work-life balance • Conclusions: reproducing/challenging employment norms and spaces

3. From The Times January 10, 2009 £500 carrot to persuade stay-at-home mothers to get back into the workplace Mothers who have been looking after children full-time for five years or more will be entitled to training worth £500 to help them get back to work. The allowance, which would cost taxpayers up to £10 million a year, could pay for refreshing IT skills, retraining for a new career or helping mothers to start the process of getting a job, such as instruction in interview technique or pay negotiation. The proposal comes as research suggests that more mothers than ever are looking at going back to work because their husband or partner has lost his job or fears that he might. ... John Denham, the Skills Secretary, who has drawn up the proposals, thought it would be unfair to offer it just to the low-skilled, or those on means-tested benefits. Research shows all women coming back to work after a long absence struggle to get into the positions they were in before they left, whether they were professionals or low-skilled. The latest figures show four out of ten mothers with children under five now stay at home full-time, and three out of ten mothers with children aged between five and ten are still caring for them full-time. The family is set to become a key political battleground between Labour and the Conservatives at the next general election.

4. Policy focus • Mothers, training and paid employment • Visibility of ‘non-working’ parents (McDowell et al, 2005 a and b) • Skills for Life agenda (DfEE, 2001) • 6th most important group (Appleby and Bathmaker, 2006) • New Deal for Lone Parents (Smith et al, 2008) • Training spaces and experiences often overlooked (Buckingham et al, 2006)

5. Entrepreneurship and gender • Challenging the masculinised normative model of ‘the entrepreneur’ (Ahl, 2002) • ‘Publicness’ and ‘gender blindness’ (Kabeer, 2003) of entrepreneurial discourse • Conceptual space shaped by social reproduction • Different ‘types’ of female entrepreneur (Bruni et al, 2004): • ‘Dualists’ – enabling flexibility for family life • ‘Return workers’ – employment fulfilment beyond family • Centred round reproduction and familial care

6. Body work • Fruitful area for sociological and, increasingly, geographical research (e.g. see Dyer et al, 2008) • Work that focuses on the interaction between bodies (Wolkowitz, 2002 and 2006) • Body work continues to be undertaken primarily by women • “Whether it be in the field of basic nursing, massage, beauty therapy or sex work…contemporary sex/gender power relations tend to relegate the hands-on care of others’ bodies, and the spaces they occupy, to women”. (Oerton, 2004: 561) • “It’s stuff that girls can relate to, you know, without wishing to be sexist or anything but it is. It’s not like when you sat at school at the back of the physics class or something”. (FG, curing)

7. Body work • Highly maternalised discourse of motherhood, care and familial responsibility: • “Body work is…intimately linked with women’s bodily lives through motherhood and nurturance. Because women do this work for babies and children, these activities are generalised as female”. (Twigg, 2000: 407) • “Well that’s the mother’s instinct. They have a caring nature”. (Tutor, Farah, Reflexology and Full Body Massage)

8. The ‘body training’ project • Title: The body training choices, expectations and experiences of mothers in West London • Qn: How does training choice affect mothers’ expectations of paid employment, employment prospects and labour market position?

9. Motivations • For body work • Existing knowledge and confidence • Employment – financial independence andcontrol • Role model to children • Employment – ‘work-life balance’ • ‘Give something back’ • For entrepreneurship • How these map onto aspirations for entrepreneurship • Gender and maternal identity • Class, ethnicity and migrant status

10. Entrepreneurial aspirations “The majority, I would say, want to end up running their own business” (Tutor, Aromatherapy Massage) “Some of them form their own Company ... When I was doing my body massage course there was a student who said, ‘Okay, let’s open a Company and work together’” (Tutor, Reflexology and Full Body Massage) “You can have you own business for hairdressing ... Mobile hairdressing and things like that” (FG, adorning) “That’s the good thing about this kind of course, you know, if you’ve got quite a big house you can also work at home, start off by working at home then later develop it into a bigger business” (FG, curing) “ All they need is to buy a couch and they can go into anybody’s home and earn quite a lot of money when it suits them...They haven’t got to change their life to fit in with the job” (Tutor, Indian Head Massage)

11. Financial independence andcontrol • Feminised areas of work notoriously low paid and low status with inflexible hours • “I think the money’s not great, if you’re actually working for somebody. I don’t think the money’s that great” (FG, adorning) • “Definitely because they charge like £50/£60 quid for a massage these places then they give the girls a fiver you know, its criminal really” (FG, curing) • “Because in a salon sometimes people get paid, sometimes they get paid commission. The stability is not there every month that you know what salary you’re getting in and I can’t live like that” (FG, curing) • “In this industry you can be working until 8 o’clock at night. So I’m having to find a job that is okay with my hours to be 9-5 basically” (Student, Beauty) • Working to meet the childcare needs of ‘professional’ mothers (Smith et al, 2008)

12. Work-life balance • Balancing work and family • “One of the things within the industry that I come from is a lot of people work for themselves, can work mobile, therefore can fit that type of thing in around the hours of school and childcare” (Tutor, Nail Art) • Class and lone parent status • “I’ve got three [children] and I’m a single mum so my work has to fit around the children...yeah, hopefully go self-employed. You know, getting my own table and everything and set up so I can work around my children” (FG, pleasuring) • “with the massage, when I sat down and I thought if I get my own business or work from home to begin with ... I can work around my kids” (Student, Aromatherapy Massage) • Unable to transcend childcare responsibilities

13. Ethnicity and migrant status • Being ‘other’ in the workplace and managing corporeality • “Congo people go, ‘da, da, da, da, da’ [talking very quickly, loudly and expressively]… My teacher, she said ‘Claudine, you are rude!’” (Student, Pathway to Care with ESOL) • Extending aspirations across space • “…to bring childcare to a totally different country because it’s [Libya] not a European country, it’s a country which, their childcare standards are very low which it effects me a lot because I’ve had a better lifestyle than other people there, and my children have had a better lifestyle than there”. (Student, Childcare)

14. Some conclusions... • Training for body work and potentially reproducing ‘entrepreneurial ghettos’ (Bowen and Hisrich, 1986) • Reiterate idea of ‘breeding grounds’ for women’s entrepreneurship (Bruni et al, 2004) • Performing maternal identity through practice of body work and emotional labor • Localised entrepreneurial space of bodies

15. Some conclusions... • Structural and discursive barriers to fulfilling entrepreneurial aspirations • Not recognising themselves in, and not being recognised through, existing entrepreneurial discourse • Risks of self employment • “But still, I wouldn’t like to do it alone. I would like to go into partnership, because I think it’d be too much responsibility for one person, especially as you’re a single parent, and if you was to go along with somebody else, if you was to become ill or your child was, you’d have someone there, to take over the salon so…” (FG, adorning) • Preparation for becoming an entrepreneur? • “My future plans, it may not happen but I would like to go and get a Management Degree and I’m 26 now, I am looking when I’m 36/37 in about ten years time to have something like my own business in partnership with a friend of mine” (Student, Beauty)