Ashley Wong

(Tilburg University)

will give a presentation on 

Motherhood and the Gender Gap in Self-Employment 

Abstract

Women continue to be underrepresented in self-employment, and female-owned businesses tend to underperform relative to male-owned ones. We leverage the richness of Dutch administrative data and an event-study approach to shed light on the role of motherhood in the gender gap in self-employment and its implications on the type of customer they serve. We find a significant motherhood effect on self-employment: six years after childbirth, the average effect for mothers is a 16% decline in self-employment and a 26% decline in profits compared to fathers. We also show that, after childbirth, women focus their entrepreneurial activities more on female-oriented sectors relative to men.  

(joint with Mery Ferrando, Teodora Tsankova, and Francesca Truffa)