Disentangling succession and entrepreneurship gender gaps: gender norms, culture, and family
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Disentangling succession and entrepreneurship gender gaps: gender norms, culture, and family Manuel Feldmann & Martin Lukes & Lorraine Uhlaner
Accepted: 30 September 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract This study adapts a multi-level view of culture, including society- and family-based gender norms and the family embeddedness perspective, to predict the career status of a sample of 2897 young Europeans (aged 18–35) from 11 countries, with at least one selfemployed parent. We find that gender identity is associated with career status such that a woman is more likely than a man to be an employee vs. a successor to a family firm but no less likely to be a founder as compared with either being an employee or successor. However, certain family and society-level culture variables combined with gender identity reverse these trends. A woman with caring responsibilities is more likely to be a successor than either a founder or employee. Also, while two-way interaction effects for traditional gender norms and having a self-employed mother are weak or not significant, the study finds that in combination, a woman reporting both traditional gender norms M. Feldmann (*) Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, University of Heidelberg, Bergheimer Str. 58, 69115 Heidelberg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] M. Lukes Department of Entrepreneurship, Prague University of Economics and Business, nam. W. Churchilla 4, 130 67 Prague 3, Czech Republic e-mail: [email protected] L. Uhlaner Department of Management and Humanities, EDHEC Business School, 24, Avenue Gustave Delory—CS 50411, 59057 Roubaix Cedex 1, France e-mail: [email protected]
and having a self-employed mother is more likely to be a successor than being either an employee or a founder, reversing gender identity main effects. Incorporating the family embeddedness perspective and the role of culture in occupational choice, we develop a better view of the gender gap in entrepreneurship, finding that the family may serve as a stronger influence than society when implied norms of these two levels of culture clash. By examining actual rather than intended career choice, we also contribute to the occupational choice literature on youth employment. Keywords Entrepreneurship . Family embeddedness . Gender . Culture . Family business succession . Selfemployment JEL classifications C12 . C31 . C83 . J12 . J16 . J24 . L26 . M13 . M14
1 Introduction An individual’s involvement in an entrepreneurial career, whether as a founder or family business successor, is not gender neutral (Ahl 2006; Jennings and Brush 2013), with men’s entrepreneurial activity higher than that of women in most countries (Baughn et al. 2006; Jennings and Brush 2013; Lukeš et al. 2019). Furthermore, daughters in families with self-employed parents are less likely than sons to take over the family business (Nelson and Constantinidis 2017; Overbeke et al. 2013). Jennings and Brush (2013, p. 679) sum up these
M. Feldmann et al.
findings by suggesting that “entrepreneurship is a gendered phenomenon.”
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