The entrepreneurial gender gap: The role of in-group support and national embeddedness values in young women’s entrepreneurship

Abstract

This article uses a global multilevel sample to advance our understanding of the gender gap in youth entrepreneurship by investigating the joint moderating influence of in-group support and national embeddedness values on young women’s entrepreneurial activity relative to that of young men. Based on a mixed embeddedness theoretical lens, our moderation analysis demonstrates the importance of in-group support in narrowing the gender gap in youth entrepreneurship. Moreover, in-group support enhances young women’s entrepreneurship vis-à-vis that of young men primarily in countries with strong embeddedness values. Our findings contribute to the entrepreneurial gender gap literature as well as to the comparative entrepreneurship literature, by providing evidence of the joint role of micro-level and macro-level cultural layers in reducing the entrepreneurial gender gap. Implications for theory, practice and policy are provided.

The critical role of assertiveness of women business owners in the link between firm performance and family instrumental support

“…Entrepreneurship has been normatively gender oriented (Bloemen-Bekx et al, 2019) so, considered a male-gendered phenomenon (Ahl, 2006;Henry et al, 2016;Jennings and Brush, 2013) and stereotyped as a male career (Gupta et al, 2009). Research on the impact of gender on entrepreneurial activity has been growing steadily, with women being the gendered subject, often in terms of the gender gap in self-employment rates (Marlow, 2020;Marlow and Martinez Dy, 2018;Weiss et al, 2023). Accordingly, research has afforded greater scrutiny towards women, than men, in leadership roles (Gupta et al, 2018;Ryan and Haslam, 2007).…”