IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hai/wpaper/202303.html

The Well-being of Women Entrepreneurs: The Role of Gender Inequality and Gender Roles

Author

Listed:
  • Inessa Love

    (University of Hawaii)

  • Boris Nikolaev

    (Colorado State University)

  • Chandra Dhakal

    (Royal Thimphu College, Bhutan)

Abstract

We present new evidence on the well-being of women entrepreneurs using data from the World Values Survey for 80 countries. We find that in low- and middle-income countries, female entrepreneurs have lower well-being than male entrepreneurs, while in high-income countries, they have higher well-being. We further explore several macro and micro-level mechanisms-- institutional context, gender roles, and individual characteristics--that potentially moderate this relationship. We find that the gender gap in well-being is larger in countries with higher gender inequality, lower level of financial development, and stricter adherence to sexist gender roles. We also find that women entrepreneurs with lower education, more children, and risk-averse preferences are likely to report lower well-being. Our results suggest several policy mechanisms that can be used to enhance the well-being of women entrepreneurs.

Suggested Citation

  • Inessa Love & Boris Nikolaev & Chandra Dhakal, 2023. "The Well-being of Women Entrepreneurs: The Role of Gender Inequality and Gender Roles," Working Papers 202303, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:hai:wpaper:202303
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.economics.hawaii.edu/research/workingpapers/WP_23-03.pdf
    File Function: First version, 2023
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Evelien P. M. Croonen & Florian Noseleit & Michael Wyrwich, 2025. "From values to ventures: how value priorities influence entrepreneurial well-being," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 65(1), pages 79-105, June.
    2. Verena Atud Achick-Muyu, 2025. "Bridging the Gap: Integrating Gym-Based Childcare For Non Communicable Disease Prevention in Post Partum Women," International Journal of Research and Innovation in Applied Science, International Journal of Research and Innovation in Applied Science (IJRIAS), vol. 10(10), pages 2656-2668, October.
    3. Cheng, Zhiming & Wang, Haining & Yu, Xiaoyu & Zhang, Le, 2025. "From struggle to startup: How childhood socioeconomic status shapes entrepreneurial happiness," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 143(C).
    4. Vlad Gabriel Cârstea & Ana Maria Mihaela Iordache & Alexandru Ionescu & Nela Ramona Grigore & Cristina Coculescu, 2024. "Enhancing Well-Being at Population Level: A Case Study on Romania," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 16(23), pages 1-26, November.
    5. Rodrigo Barbosa & Mayara Barbosa & Amalia Raquel Pérez-Nebra & Esther Villajos & Fernando González-Ladrón-de-Guevara, 2025. "A half-century perspective of entrepreneur’s well-being: comparing academic and global entrepreneurship monitor trends," Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 12(1), pages 1-15, December.
    6. Di Song & Xuan Huang, 2025. "Political participation and new venture decentralization: an attention-based view," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 65(1), pages 509-533, June.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • M13 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Business Administration - - - New Firms; Startups
    • I31 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - General Welfare, Well-Being
    • J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hai:wpaper:202303. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Web Technician (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/deuhius.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.