Research summary Women continue to be disproportionately underrepresented in new venture creation. We investigate whether and how founders can differently influence future entrepreneurial career choices of their male and female joiners. Using a large sample of startup firms with personnel where founders interact closely with joiners, we demonstrate that founders have a strong influence on a joiner's entrepreneurial career choice if both are female. We find empirical support for role modeling as a key underlying mechanism, accounting for alternative explanations such as selective matching based on gender and push‐driven factors. These findings increase our understanding of the roles of socialization and organizational context in shaping the career outcomes of employees, and provide evidence of a multiplier effect of female entrepreneurs. Managerial summary Women are less likely to be entrepreneurs than men. We investigate whether working in a startup founded by a woman instead of a man influences individuals' decision to become an entrepreneur later. We find this to be the case for women. This result is best explained by female founders acting as role models for their female employees in male‐dominated domains. Female founders able to break gender stereotypes seem to have an influence on the career choices of their female employees, especially among those who have lacked contact with entrepreneurs. Moreover, this influence is stronger if the female founder and employee have similar backgrounds. These findings confirm the importance of social interactions at work and suggest new ways to inspire more women to launch startups.

The current economic crisis has raised concerns about the persistent increasing duration of unemployment. Although lay-offs at large firms normally make headlines during crises, we still know little about the potential impact of firm size on firms' adjustment behavior under a crisis context. We study firm size effects on employment growth during economic slowdowns, using a rich microeconomic database for the 1988-2007 period in the Portuguese manufacturing industry. The results show that economic downturns impacted negatively upon firm growth. This negative impact is found to be higher for larger firms, either during or also immediately after crisis periods. Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) emerge as potential stabilizers in downturn periods. However, larger firms seem to be able to quickly recover from downturn periods.Our results contribute to the scarce literature on these matters and also to the understanding of the Portuguese case, where there are a great number of SMEs which secure the majority of jobs. These first results may be useful as SMEs play a determinant role in other economies of the European Union (EU).

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The global crisis has called to further reflection on the role of multinationals in host economies during crisis. The evidence on this matter is scarce and no definite conclusions were achieved. Using panel data analysis, this paper examines the link between foreign ownership, firm employment and turnover growth over twenty years and during economic downturns in particular. We analyse the determinants of firm employment and turnover growth and investigate whether there are significant differences in both variables among domestic and foreign firms when controlling for firm and industry specificities. Additionally we assess if the foreignness effect alters during economic downturns. After controlling for several firm and industry characteristics, we find no significant differences between domestic and foreign firms in what concerns employment growth. However, our results suggest that foreign ownership may affect positively firms' sales turnover growth during recessions.