What Brings Female Professionals to Entrepreneurship? Exploring the Antecedents of Women’s Professional Entrepreneurship

So Young Choi and Sang-Joon Kim
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So Young Choi: LeBow College of Business, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA
Sang-Joon Kim: Ewha School of Business, Ewha Womans University, Seoul 03760, Korea

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 4, 1-16

Abstract: This study explores how female professionals engage in starting their own businesses, known as professional entrepreneurship. In particular, this study specifies what factors foster the likelihood of self-employment of female professionals. Drawing upon the push and pull theories of entrepreneurship, we argue that individual capabilities (as a pull factor) make the self-employment of female professionals less likely, while discrimination experiences (as a push factor) make the self-employment of female professionals more likely. Given such bifurcated effects of these factors, we examine the combinatory effects of individual capabilities and discrimination experiences (which are specified as attribute-based and family-based discrimination experiences) on the rate of self-employment of female professionals. With a sample of 1356 female lawyers in the U.S., we test our hypotheses predicting the rate of self-employment with respect to prior salary and discrimination experiences. Our results reveal that prior salary (a pull factor) motivates female lawyers to stay at the traditional law firms, whereas attribute-based discrimination experiences (a push factor) motivate them to open their own office. Furthermore, we find that such a push effect is pronounced only among the female lawyers with lower salaries. Then, the empirical findings are discussed to elaborate the process of female professionals’ entrepreneurship.

Keywords: professional entrepreneurship; self-employment; push theory; pull theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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