The gender gap in entrepreneurship: The role of the relative pay off from entrepreneurship

Paper in proceeding, 2022

Objectives
Entrepreneurship education garners increasing interest, with current trends showing a greater number of women applying.  However, less is known about how attendees experience the use of their education post-education in general, in regard to the relative pay-off in graduates’ subsequent careers. Similarly, the extent to which applied entrepreneurial competencies gained may differentiate in careers of women compared to men is also understudied. Research on the distinct gender populations, focusing on occupational differences have limited space in literature. The objective of this paper is to investigate the career metrics in income and work-life balance, comparing and contrasting a population of entrepreneurship education graduates, along gender lines.

Literature review
Literature points an underlying gender bias in entrepreneurship, where opportunity-based entrepreneurial careers and self-concept of an entrepreneur has predominantly been studied from a male perspective. For example, studies have highlighted aspects of gender bias towards women engaging in opportunity-based entrepreneurship such as difficulty in obtaining necessary funding for growth, challenges in accessing entrepreneurial networks, lower levels of self-belief and self-efficacy regarding entrepreneurial activity, differences in education, and imbalance in work expectations relative to home life. However, these studies have predominantly focused on a new firm formation definition of entrepreneurship. The utilization of entrepreneurial competencies, as developed through entrepreneurship education that focuses on experience- and reflection-based approaches to learning, have in recent studies shown to be equally important for intrapreneurs as self-employed entrepreneurs. This reflects the broader contextual spread of applied entrepreneurial competence in graduate careers. The entrepreneurial careers of the female graduates who engage in ideation and implementation of new business activity after an entrepreneurship education, may it be in firm formation or in employed roles, remains understudied. Therefore, the question is raised: What is the relative pay-off (i.e., income and work-life balance) of entrepreneurship in relation to occupational choice and gender for graduates of entrepreneurship educations?

Approach/Method
Alumni from three master-level venture creation programs at three universities in Northern Europe were contacted for this study. From a total population of 1103 (graduating between 1997-2018),531 graduates responded, resulting in a response rate of 48.1 percent. The gender distribution in the total population is 28.5 percent female, and within the respondent sample it is 29.5 percent female. Two dimensions of career progress: income and work-life balance, was then analyzed with a set of dependent variables and control variables in ordinal regression. These regressors include career start-up experience and to what extent ideation and implementation of new business activity in employed occupations impacts the independent variables.  Models are based on separate regressions on men and women with the purpose to highlight gendered differences in career progression and what regressors contributes to this.

Results/Findings
The findings were divided into separate sets by the two dependent variables, income and work-life balance. For income levels, career length is shared by both men and women as being a strong predictor. Beyond that, the regression analysis gives different versions for women and men of what contributes to a high income. Men in paid employment (as conventional employees or intrapreneurs) earns more than their self-employed and hybrid (combining employment and self-employment) peers. For women, there is no significant differences among the occupations. For both genders, type of industry is also influential towards the income level. Work-life balance generated regressions that points towards small influences of the regressors for women. For men, having a partner indicates a higher work-life balance, which is not significant for women. Also, having less work related to entrepreneurial competencies (i.e., being conventional employed), results in a more positive work-life balance.

Value & Implications
Entrepreneurship education is shown to have many positive impacts on subsequent careers.  However, entrepreneurial competencies developed through education do not appear to counteract the general gender differences seen in society, as differentiation between male and female graduates is evident through the study. Where previous research has focused on studying these differences, this study instead focuses on how income and work-life balance unfolds across gender categories of venture creation program graduates. These programs have shown to produce graduates who have developed and later utilized entrepreneurial competencies to a high degree in both employed and self-employed contexts. Though in the subsequent careers, the progression of income and work-life balance falls under different mechanisms depending on the gender of the graduate. Women seems to have more stable progression compared to men, with less variation between occupations. Though a limitation lies within that the regressors builds lesser models for women compared to men. This indicates that future research should consider an expanded set of variables or focus on designing qualitative studies target towards career progression of female entrepreneurs. In conclusion this study informs the need to consider the entrepreneurial career progression of women as different compared to their male graduates.