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A photo of Dr Angela Dy with co-authors of her winning paper at the ISBE Conference Awards, holding a plaque alongside people presenting the award, all stood smiling towards the camera

Image credit: John Houlihan

Loughborough academic wins overall Best Paper at ISBE conference

Dr Angela Martinez Dy recently won two categories for her research paper at the Institute for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (ISBE) 2022 conference, which took place in York.

The theme of this year’s conference was New Approaches to Raising Entrepreneurial Opportunity: Reshaping inclusive Enterprise, Policy, and Practice Post-Pandemic, and attendees were invited to submit research papers linked to this theme with a chance to be named a winner of a selection of categories.  

Dr Martinez Dy was the lead author of Mythbusting meritocracy: an intersectional feminist labour market perspective on racial capitalism and UK self-employment, and along with co-authors Professor Jayawarna and Professor Marlow, was named the winner of not only Best Paper in the Gender and Enterprise category but also Best Paper at the ISBE 2022 conference.  

The paper takes an exploratory intersectional feminist approach to understanding patterns of racialised, classed and gendered inequality in UK self-employment. Drawing on the UK Labour Force Survey, which is the largest household study using a representative sample of the UK population, it finds clear penalties related to being from a non-dominant group in each of these categories; these are cumulative, as intersectional feminists claim. It uses insights from theories on racial capitalism and feminist economics to explain these outcomes.  

Dr Martinez Dy commented: “It was both a great honour and a surprise to have won Best Paper in the Gender and Enterprise category and Best Paper for the ISBE 2022 conference overall. It felt meaningful and strangely satisfying to be at the gala awards dinner in the Merchant Adventurer’s Hall in York, where the original English venture capitalists met hundreds of years ago to pool resources for colonial expeditions, and to be recognised for a paper illuminating the harms of racial capitalism. A bit of poetic justice, if you will.” 

The awards illustrate Dr Martinez Dy’s thought leadership in entrepreneurship and the ways in which intersectional and anti-racist feminist insights can advance the field of business and management studies.  

Although the winning paper is not currently available to read publicly, a theoretical paper written by Dr Martinez Dy that makes similar arguments has been published in the European Management Review and can be viewed online.  

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