ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some barriers preventing people with disabilities from participating in entrepreneurship and additional barriers further compounded by the challenges faced when starting and running a business as a woman with a disability. The history of disability and institutionalization is distinct in many European countries, where an entire generation was lost to the Eugenic influences of the second World War. Disability studies scholars have challenged reductionist approaches where disability has been defined using deficiency models, often referred to as the medical model. In the US, people with disabilities have a long history of oppression and segregation that continues today and is represented in their exclusion from employment on a structural and cultural level. People with disabilities, and women in particular, encounter both a glass ceiling and a glass cliff effect. Over the past two decades, entrepreneurship has been promoted as a strategy for addressing the prevalence of unemployment and underemployment among people with disabilities.
