Career Antecedants of Female Entrepreneurship

• In Event: 2451 - Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 3. Entrepreneurship

Abstract

Entrepreneurship scholars have commonly explained women’s transition to entrepreneurship by their need to reconcile work-family conflicts. Although this explanation has its virtues, it exhibits an important limitation: it primarily explains women’s transitions into self-employment, presenting entrepreneurship as a hindrance to female career advancement. Casting female entrepreneurship in a positive light, this study proposes an alternative perspective that view business creation as seeking career advancement by women, especially when they face employer discrimination. Integrating the entrepreneurship literature and theories of motherhood penalty, we propose that women may seek career opportunities in entrepreneurship in response to career constriants resulting from discrimination in wage employment. Analyzing the matched employer-employee data from Sweden that track employees and their organizations from 1990-2013, we show that women launch new organizations at higher rates when they become mothers. We also demonstrate that the effect of motherhood on founding a new organization is stronger when women face greater employer discrimination but not greater job-flexibility constraints. Finally, we find that work-life conflict strongly predicts entry into self-employment but is less consequential for launching new ventures. Our work thus contributes to the literature by proposing and empirically validating an alternative perspective on female entrepreneurship.

Authors

• Tiantian Yang, Duke University

• Aleksandra Joanna Kacperczyk, MIT Sloan School of Management