Invisible Burdens, Resilient Selves: Examining the Emotional Well-Being of Women Micro-Entrepreneurs Through a Socio-Psychological and Structural Lens

The issue of women involvement in micro-entrepreneurship has been extensively advocated as an empowerment avenue to economic gains but little has been done to highlight the emotional aspects of this entrepreneurship participation. This paper investigates the emotional health of women micro-entrepreneurs in an integrated socio-psychological and structural perspective, which preempts the emotional load carried by the informal and quasi-formal entrepreneurial settings which stay unseen. The study relies on qualitative, exploratory research design basing on semi-structured interviews, narrative life histories, and reflective journaling/emotion-mapping techniques in order to document lived emotional experiences. The discussion indicates that income instability and gender expectations are the major factors that push women micro entrepreneurs to continually face chronic stress, anxiety, role conflict, and emotional spillover into family life. Although the theme of resilience is present, the results show that it is more a survival strategy instead of an empowered policy, whichbis maintained with the help of consistent emotional self-management and avoidance coping behaviours (Stephan et al., 2020). The decisive factor in creating and naturalizing emotional distress is structural, including institutional neglect, informality, and precarity that is created due to the policy, thus refuting individualistic interpretations of entrepreneurialbsuccess (Kabeer, 2020). The study contributes to the theoretical knowledge about entrepreneurship as an emotionally embodied and structurally located process by incorporating the emotional state into the analysis of feminist entrepreneurship (Brush et al., 2022). The results highlight the necessity of gender-sensitive entrepreneurship policies that should include psychosocial support, mental health, and care-focused policy models. The acknowledgement of women micro-entrepreneurs as not only economic actors but also emotional ones is the key to practical and ethical entrepreneurship systems. Keywords Women micro-entrepreneurs; Emotional well-being; Feminist entrepreneurship; Resilience; Informal economy; Socio-psychological analysis; Structural inequality; Gender-responsive policy