Gender, race, and family: Is there a double disadvantage in self-employment?

• In Event: 2266 - Family Section Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 22. Work-Family Balance: Orientations, Strategies, and Spillover

Abstract

Family responsibilities deter women’s employment. Self-employment has been portrayed as a solution for women to integrate work and family demands. The “mumpreneurship” literature indicates an upsurge in female self-employment greatly driven by mothers, who are increasingly creating their own ventures in search for independence and flexibility that wage labor lacks. Although mumpreneurship has been portrayed as a universal phenomenon, most of the evidence has been based on data for white women. This study examines the extent to which the mumpreneurship thesis can be applied to racial/ethnic minorities and immigrant women in the U.S. using recent data from the Current Population Survey. We found that marriage and children encourage wage employment and self-employment for all men and native Black women, but discourage employment for all other women. We find strong evidence for the mumpreneurship thesis among native-born white mothers, for whom self-employment constitutes a preferred alternative over wage employment. For all other racial minority and immigrant women, children do not seem to facilitate female entrepreneurship. The findings suggest that mumpreneurship, as a strategy for combining work and family responsibilities, has been overstated, applying mainly to white women, but not to racial minority and immigrant women.

Authors

• Sandra Florian, Institut National d'Etudes Demographiques (INED)

• Cecile Fonrouge, Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières