Gendered transitions to self-employment and business ownership: a linked-lives perspective

Publication type

Journal Article

Authors

Publication date

February 12, 2024

Summary:

We apply the sociological lens of linked lives to show how household contexts channel transitions to self-employment in ways strongly differentiated by gender. We investigate the impact of demographic transitions to marriage, cohabitation and having children on the transition to self-employment using fixed-effects models on 10 waves of the UK’s nationally representative survey, Understanding Society. Men’s transitions to self-employment and separately to business ownership are remarkably impervious to the arrival of a new child in the household. In contrast, second births raise the odds of self-employment for women and have a strong and statistically significant association with business ownership, highlighting the role of birth parity as a household influence. Within the subset of opposite-sex couples, lives are indeed linked: a partner’s long hours precipitate the other partner’s transition into self-employment for men and women. However, the effect is asymmetric to the extent that women are much more likely to have a partner working long hours. Marriage is associated with a much higher likelihood of transitioning to business ownership for both men and women, which does not hold for self-employment overall.

Published in

Entrepreneurship and Regional Development

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1080/08985626.2024.2310107

ISSN

8985626

Subjects

Notes

Online Early

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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