Between Persistence and Precarity: Women’s Exit from Online Business in China

• In Event: 50261 - Family Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 8: Family & Technology

Abstract

Existing research about entrepreneurs quitting their businesses often attribute the exit to their unsatisfactory performance, and women may be regarded as particularly resilient or vulnerable given different kinds of gender stereotypes. Situated in the rise of the Internet economy in China, this research adopts a more dynamic and critical approach to examine different kinds of "exit" of women from their self-employed online businesses and their corresponding strategies. These women faced different kinds of risks and uncertainties in their online businesses, which were intensified under socioeconomic changes and pandemic influences. However, the act of quitting business did not necessarily suggest an ending point of their business attempts. Drawing on in-depth interviews and online observations, this study focuses on a young and well-educated group of women with different levels of commitment to their online businesses and examines why and how some decided to quit their businesses and others did not. Their experiences illustrate how women made the exit decision, explored the reentry options, navigated in different industries, or took the exit as a short break. Depending on women's different levels of devotion and their various life stages, the findings suggest that full-time online businesswomen were more likely to drop out, and part-time businesswomen seemed to be more open to other possibilities, indicating different forms of agency and resilience in running business in the digital era.

Author

• Lin Tang, Hong Kong University