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

So Young Choi,Sang-Joon Kim

doi:10.3390/su13041765

So Young Choi, Sang-Joon Kim

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/su13041765

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Journal: Sustainability	Publication Date: Feb 6, 2021
Citations: 2	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Drexel University, Ewha Womans University

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.

Highlights

Literature on entrepreneurship has focused mainly on idea recognition, generation, and implementation [1,2,3], whereas it is still developing the entrepreneurial processes of minorities [4,5,6]
With a sample of 1356 female lawyers in the U.S, we examine the effect of a pull factor instantiated by prior salary and push factors instantiated by discrimination on the rate of self-employment
This study shows how female lawyers can be motivated to engage in self-employment

Summary

Introduction

Literature on entrepreneurship has focused mainly on idea recognition, generation, and implementation [1,2,3], whereas it is still developing the entrepreneurial processes of minorities [4,5,6]. Studies on self-employment pay much attention to the question of why people who are disadvantaged choose to be self-employed, and there are two hypothetical arguments that are popularly known as the “pull” and “push” theories [10,11,12]. The former is that attractive business opportunities will pull individuals with higher levels of capability, whereas the latter is that factors such as low levels of education or discrimination, which are hard to overcome, push workers into self-employment [8,12,13,14]. Since the glass ceiling effect is closely related to an individual’s career when embedded in traditional organizations, self-employment of female professionals will be influenced by such social barriers [17]

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion