This paper explores women’s entrepreneurial activities in the Gulf in light of the state attention given to promoting entrepreneurship in the region over the past decade. In the Gulf Arab countries, like in many rapidly developing economies, neoliberal growth discourse abounds. Along with this, the promotion of entrepreneurship and embrace of individual enterprise is paramount. Despite the dominance of the state in political and economic spaces, Gulf governments have embraced the rhetoric of the market and entrepreneurship. Drawing from semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and participant observation conducted between 2011 and 2014, this paper examines this phenomenon. In a region stereotyped with weak gender development outcomes, female entrepreneurship is largely cast as a positive development aimed at liberating and empowering women through individual enterprise. In contrast, this paper finds that the same forces that are meant to empower women, while on one hand succeeding, on the other often reproduce or reinforce gender norms while introducing new forms of subjugation. Gulf female entrepreneurs confront three intersecting structural logics that are difficult to overcome: the structural logic of the economy, the political logic of state control, and the logic of social organisation.