The family - a barrier or motivation for female entrepreneurship?

Marit Rønsen ()
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Marit Rønsen: Statistics Norway, https://www.ssb.no/en/forskning/ansatte

Discussion Papers from Statistics Norway, Research Department

Abstract: The underrepresentation of women in entrepreneurship is consistent over cultures and countries, and is even higher in Norway than in most other industrialised societies. In spite of a growing literature, the reasons for this pattern are still not well understood. In this paper I explore an area that has been little researched so far, the family and household situation. I study the presence of children and their ages, the role of the partner's characteristics and the household's financial resources. The results show that women are more likely to choose self-employment over wage-work when the children are small, indicating that children are no barrier to entrepreneurship, at least not when defined as self-employment as in this paper. The self-employment propensity of both women and men are negatively related to their partner's working hours and positively related to him (or her) being self-employed himself (herself). The causal direction of these relationships cannot be established in the present analysis and needs to be investigated closer in future research.

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; self-employment; gender; work and family; partner's characteristics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J13 J16 J22 L26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem and nep-ent
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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