The Long Shadow of the Family and the Gender Gap in Entrepreneurship: A Cross-Cultural Perspective

Talk by Juliette de Wit (University of Groningen) as part of the Research Seminar Series of the IOS Economics Department.

This article introduces a cross-cultural family values perspective to explain gender disparities in entrepreneurship. We argue that the societal emphasis on the family–cultural family values–intensifies traditional gender-inegalitarian role expectations and widens the gender gap in entrepreneurship. Yet cultural family values can themselves be gendered, shaped by differences in how parents raise daughters versus sons, with important variation across cultures. This leads us to introduce the novel construct of culturally-gendered family values, which can exacerbate gender-essentialist notions about ‘inherent’ differences between women and men, and thereby amplify the gender gap in entrepreneurship. To disentangle culture from other country-level influences, such as labor market conditions and formal institutions, we examine the entrepreneurial choices of 90,948 second-generation immigrants of 66 different ancestries born and raised in the United States. We find that culturally-gendered family values, but not cultural family values, widen the gender gap in entrepreneurship. These results are robust to alternative cultural explanations, including gender norms, non-cultural explanations, such as discrimination, and they replicate in a second cross-country study. We further show that our theoretical predictions extend to the gender gap in leadership. Overall, our study highlights not only the gendered effect of cultural family values but also the gendered nature of cultural family values.