Crossroads of Identity: Exploring Intersectional Influences on Migrant Women Entrepreneurs in Family Businesses

This study adopts an intersectional perspective to explore how migrant women entrepreneurs (MWEs) navigate the complexities of operating within family businesses. Building on Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality, we examine how contextual, familial, and individual-level factors interact to shape entrepreneurial behavior. While research on women’s entrepreneurship has advanced significantly, limited attention has been paid to how overlapping identities—such as gender, migrant status, and family roles—collectively influence entrepreneurial agency within family firms. Using a qualitative multi-case study design, we conducted in-depth interviews with ten first-generation MWEs operating family businesses in Sardinia, Italy—a region marked by a strong family business tradition and rising immigration. Our analysis reveals two entrepreneurial response patterns: business-centric and individual-centric. The business-centric response focuses on strategic business development despite adverse conditions, while the individual-centric response emphasizes personal growth and skill-building as coping strategies. These responses emerge from the intersection of three key forces: the socio-cultural environment (hostile or welcoming), family dynamics (supportive or non-supportive), and self-perception (low or high self-confidence). Theoretically, this study contributes to entrepreneurship and intersectionality research by demonstrating that MWEs’ agency is not a linear function of external constraints or personal traits, but a dynamic outcome of interrelated structural and relational pressures. It advances intersectional theory by showing how MWEs actively reinterpret and negotiate their position across multiple dimensions of inequality, thereby producing distinct entrepreneurial pathways that defy deterministic assumptions.