Tooba Asif

Buckinghamshire New University, United Kingdom

Negotiating Entrepreneurship: A Qualitative Study of Pakistani Women’s Lived Experiences within SocioCultural and Religious Contexts

Biography

Tooba Asif is a PhD researcher from Pakistan, currently based in the United Kingdom. My academic work is grounded in a strong interest in gender, entrepreneurship, and social inequality, with a particular focus on the lived experiences of women in South Asian contexts. Having grown up in Pakistan, I bring an insider perspective to my research, informed by first-hand knowledge of the cultural, religious, and social dynamics that shape women’s economic participation. Living and studying in the UK has further enriched my scholarly approach by allowing me to engage critically with international research traditions, feminist methodologies, and comparative perspectives on entrepreneurship and gender. My doctoral research adopts a qualitative, interpretivist framework to explore how Pakistani women entrepreneurs navigate family expectations, moral norms, and institutional constraints in their entrepreneurial journeys. Through my work, I aim to contribute contextually grounded knowledge that challenges gender-neutral and Western-centric models of entrepreneurship and amplifies women’s voices from underrepresented settings.

Abstract

This study investigates Pakistani women’s lived experiences of entrepreneurship through an interpretivist and social constructivist methodological framework. Recognising entrepreneurship as a socially situated and gendered practice, the research moves beyond instrumental or economistic accounts to examine how women entrepreneurs interpret, negotiate, and narrate their entrepreneurial activities within deeply embedded socio-cultural, religious, and familial contexts. The study is informed by a relativist ontology, acknowledging multiple, contextually situated realities, and a constructivist epistemology that treats knowledge as co-produced through interaction between researcher and participant.

Adopting a qualitative, exploratory research design, the study responds to persistent empirical gaps in existing scholarship, which has tended to privilege quantitative indicators and homogenised representations of women’s entrepreneurship in Pakistan. Such approaches have often obscured the interpretive, moral, and relational dimensions of women’s entrepreneurial lives. To address these limitations, the research employs semi-structured, in-depth interviews as the primary method of data generation, enabling participants to articulate their experiences in their own terms and allowing for the exploration of ambiguity, contradiction, and silence as analytically meaningful elements.

Participants were purposefully selected to capture diversity across socio-economic, regional, and familial contexts, reflecting the heterogeneous realities of women entrepreneurs in Pakistan. Data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis, facilitating the inductive identification of patterns of meaning while remaining theoretically sensitive to issues of gender, power, legitimacy, and moral regulation. Throughout the research process, careful attention was paid to ethical practice, reflexivity, and methodological rigour, recognising the positionality of the researcher and the power dynamics inherent in qualitative inquiry.

By foregrounding women’s voices and contextualising entrepreneurship within everyday social relations, this study contributes a nuanced, empirically grounded understanding of women’s entrepreneurship in Pakistan. Methodologically, it demonstrates the value of qualitative, interpretivist approaches for researching gendered economic practices in culturally complex contexts, while substantively offering insights that challenge universalised and gender-neutral models of entrepreneurship.