Self-Employment as a Strategy to Conciliate Work and Family Life: Native and Immigrant Men and Women Heterogeneity

Sandra Florian , Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED)
Cécile Fonrouge, Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières

Recent decades have witnessed an increasing trend in entrepreneurship in Europe and North America. Self-employment has been portrayed as a strategy to conciliate work and family demands, particularly for women. The “mumpreneurship” literature indicates that mothers are increasingly creating their own ventures searching for independence and flexibility that wage labor lacks. Although mumpreneurship has been portrayed as a universal phenomenon, most of the evidence is based on data for White women. We examine self-employment among men and women in the U.S. using data from the Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC) from 2015-2020 to investigate the extent to which the mumpreneurship thesis can be applied to ethno-racial minorities and immigrant women in the U.S. We found that marriage and children encourage wage employment and self-employment for all men and native Black women, but discourage both types of employment for all other women. We find strong evidence for the mumpreneurship thesis among native-born white mothers, for whom self-employment constitutes a preferred alternative over wage employment. Results also show that mumpreneurship represents the experiences of non-incorporated self-employed women, who tend to be more disadvantaged than incorporated self-employed entrepreneurs. The findings suggest that mumpreneurship, as a strategy for combining work and family responsibilities, has been overstated, applying mainly to white women not-incorporated, but not to racial minority and immigrant women.

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 Presented in Session 98. Flash session 2 Economics, Human Capital and Labour Markets