Abstract

Women Entrepreneurs Empowering Women: The case of WWB-Foundation Colombia (1980-2022)

Colombian entrepreneurship historiography has been focused on the study of successful businessmen and their enterprises; because of that, the main production is related to examining how each entrepreneur confronts risk and innovation but prioritizing the businessmen’s achievement which generates a wide historiography focused on a biographical perspective. Several kinds of those research described in detail the daily life of the companies showing the place that both the pioneers and their employees have played in the consolidation of each business performance. Nevertheless, those studies use to marginalize administrative management and produce broad blind spots for middle managers and even more if they are women; therefore, the role of women in Colombian business management has been studied little or even not at all. To accomplish the reinvention of our field, this paper aims to study from the logic of the history of the present time and historical anthropology the directors’ and middle managers’ women’s roles in the case of Women’s World Banking Foundation (WWB Foundation-Colombia) a third-sector enterprise founded on the 2nd of December 1980. The work is supported by the private archives of this enterprise and uses interviews with the managers and employees of the company as well as their personal agendas and notebooks that constitute a new kind of archive on entrepreneurial research. This analytical approach and the use of new documentary sources —mentioned here— challenges us to reinvent the way that business history is made in the future. Then the reinvention here is related to the women managers and to the methods that we use to study women’s role in the entrepreneurial contemporary world. The style that we use to examine this case is creative as well as analytical, at the same time allowing us to focus our attention on a group of people that usually are included as statistical data of employment.