Our Lead Researcher Davide Vannoni (University of Turin – Collegio Carlo Alberto) published a new article (with Noemi Oggero, Mariacristina Rossi and Francesco Devicienti, from the University of Turin) exploring the role of gender in explaining the link between having entrepreneurial parents and the individual entrepreneurial choices, available in open access at the Review of Income and Wealth: “You can’t be what you can’t see: the role of gender in the intergenerational transmission of entrepreneurship”.

What makes individuals want to become entrepreneurs? This is a key question, given that enterprises have a positive impact on both new job creation and innovation. Hence, a wide strand of literature has investigated the factors influencing this decision.

Having parents who were entrepreneurs themselves is certainly a crucial one, but children’s gender can strengthen or weaken this relationship. Indeed, the effect of having entrepreneurial parents may not be the same for all children.

This new publication by our lead researcher Davide Vannoni addresses this question, using the the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe data set.

Main results

• The effect of fathers on daughters is lower than that on sons in countries with a high gender gap, while it is the same in more gender-equal countries.
• It is just in countries with high gender inequality that the effect of having an entrepreneurial mother is different between sons and daughters, with the impact being positive for daughters only. This result is corroborated by an individual-level indicator of the gender gap within countries.
• There is evidence of a convergence of the intergenerational transmission process in high gender-unequal countries toward the process that typically occurs in more gender-equal countries.

Key insights

• The study highlights the importance of parental role models for individuals’ entrepreneurial choices: the presence and influence of role models are crucial for daughters when they live in contexts characterized by a big gap between women and men in their access to opportunities. Since women usually have female role models, their mothers are likely to play an important role in the choice of becoming an entrepreneur in countries with high gender gaps.
• The findings also suggest that women are more likely to be left behind when it comes to entrepreneurship. Not only are women less likely to be entrepreneurs, but they are also less likely to be influenced by their fathers’ entrepreneurial status in countries where the gap between women and men in their access to resources and opportunities is extremely large. Even though entrepreneurial mothers have an impact on daughters’ choice of becoming an entrepreneur in such countries, authors recall that the percentage of entrepreneurial mothers is still relatively low.
• However, it seems that this asymmetry in the intergenerational transfer of entrepreneurship is disappearing over time and pointing to convergence to the gender-independent process typical of more gender-equal countries.

The complete paper is available open access here.

What does this new publication mean for sustainable public procurement?

The fact that women struggle more than men to enter the business arena is worrying and overcoming this problem represents a sustainability challenge. This is especially true in the first, fragile, years of activity of the firm. To that respect, public procurement often arises as a potential instrument to be used to empower women owned businesses.

However, limited previous experiences, mainly from the United States, point at mixed/poor results after implementing this kind of policy.  Increasing the body of research that evaluates the efficacy and efficiency of public procurement in achieving this an other social sustainability outcomes is still necessary to better inform policymakers.