CCF Boardmember and Secretary, Kristi Williams, will be the next editor of the Journal of Marriage and Family. Kristi, a sociologist currently with Ohio State, specializes on the influence of family on physical and mental health. Dr. William Avison, who nominated Kristi to the JMF, describes her as “extremely talented” and “one of the stars of research on the family and health.” We couldn’t agree more!
REFEREED FLASH SESSION
Families as they Really Are:
Demographics, Disparities, and Debates
March 4‐5, 2016
University of Texas at Austin
Flash Submission Deadline is January 15, 2016
The CCF 2016 Program Committee is organizing a Flash Session as part of the 2016 Annual Conference. The Flash Session will be held in the main meeting room and will use a mini‐session format: Four presenters will speak for five minutes each, followed by a moderated Q&A. The speakers have the use of Powerpoint, but are allowed to use no more than three slides. Flash session paper titles with authors’ names and affiliations will be listed in the program. We are especially interested in highlighting the research of graduate students and junior scholars but submissions are open to all.
Those interested in presenting as part of a Flash Session must submit an abstract via email to CCF Conference Co‐Chair Corinne Reczek, at Reczek.2@osu.edu, by January 15, 2016.
Participants will be notified no later than January 31st. Conference details including hotel information can be found at: contemporaryfamilies.org/2016‐conference‐date/
Abstract Submission:
1. Incomplete abstracts will not be accepted.
2. English is the official language for all abstracts, papers, and oral presentations.
3. The abstract should concisely state the empirical and/or theoretical foundations and findings.
4. Abstracts are limited to 1,200 characters (about 200 words), not including title and author(s).
5. Valid email address ‐ Communication between CCF and presenting authors will be done only via email. Authors must have a valid email address in order to receive participant updates and are held accountable for all requests and information in those updates.
After Abstract Submission:
Notification of abstract acceptance ‐ The presenting author listed on each abstract will be notified via email by January 31, 2016
Accessibility for those with disabilities – In the email correspondence between organizers and authors of accepted abstracts, individuals are asked to please indicate whether they are a presenting author with any disability for which assistance is required, along with a statement specifying the type of assistance required. Someone from CCF will contact presenters prior to the conference to discuss specific needs. Availability of appropriate accommodations cannot be ensured without prior notification.
Support for Flash Session Presenters: While presenters are expected to pay for their own travel/lodging expenses and conference registration, presenters will receive one free year of CCF membership and may also get press coverage.
CCF Director Jennifer Glass and Board member Stephanie Coontz join CCF members Ariel Kuperberg and Constance Ahrons in commenting on divorce for Hopes & Fears’s Is Divorce Really That Bad? .
Dr. Young discusses the power of forgiveness in transitioning through grief for the families of the Charleston church shooting.
What Helps Women Entrepreneurs Flourish?
A briefing paper prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families by Sarah Thébaud, University of California at Santa Barbara
November 5, 2015
Most Americans agree that entrepreneurship is an important component of economic growth and job creation. Small businesses accounted for two million new jobs last year, and innovative start-ups like those in Silicon Valley are key contributors to our GDP.
But women are a vastly under-tapped resource when it comes to growing a vibrant economy. For instance, in 2014, woman-owned firms in the United States employed only six percent of the workforce and created less than four percent of all business revenues-a figure that is about the same as it was in 1997. Women are supposedly more likely to take on something like a franchise opportunity, such as those offered at https://poppies.co.uk/franchising/, and create a small business that meets their needs only without trying to expand to create employment for others. This is due to the fact they have the opposing priority of raising a family, which they’d rather dedicate their time to.
In a recent analysis of survey data from 24 countries between 2001 and 2008, I find some surprising evidence about different kinds of gender gaps in entrepreneurial activity and the relationship between those gender gaps and government policies. It turns out that having more women entrepreneurs does not necessarily mean that more women are running large or lucrative types of enterprises. When it comes to entrepreneurial startups, in contrast to our experience with the benefits of having more women enter traditional workplaces, sometimes fewer ends up meaning better.
For many years, scholars and policymakers have pointed out that work-family policies such as childcare and family leave make it easier for workers with caregiving responsibilities-the majority of whom are women-to remain employed. But these policies might also have unintended consequences. For instance, since they reduce women workers’ need to search for a more flexible alternative to traditional wage and salaried employment, they may also reduce their chances of starting a business.
My new research suggests that such a trade-off exists. When I control for age, education, and a host of country-level factors that are known to correlate with entrepreneurship, I find that the gender gap in the probability of starting and owning a business is larger when states spend generously on childcare than when they don’t.
For instance, in countries with little state spending on childcare, such as the U.S. or Canada, women are about two-thirds as likely as men to be engaged in entrepreneurial activity, whereas in countries where the state spends generously on such family-friendly policies, like Denmark or Finland, women are only about half as likely as men to be entrepreneurs. Raw figures from a recent report similarly suggest that women are less likely to pursue business ownership where governments invest substantially in family-friendly work policies: Approximately ten percent of the adult woman population in the U.S. and Canada, but only four percent in Finland and Denmark, was involved in starting a new business in 2014.
At first blush, this pattern seems to suggest that a lack of government social programs is a boon to free enterprise. But my analysis also shows that the relatively smaller group of women who do run businesses in contexts with supportive work-family policies are more likely to run larger and more growth-oriented businesses-businesses that are more similar to those of their men counterparts. Specifically, I find that women business owners employ more workers, express more ambitious growth intentions, and are more likely to report introducing a brand new product or service to the market in countries where government policies mandate between 20 and 30 weeks of full-time equivalent paid leave. There is also evidence that when government spending on childcare is relatively high (e.g. more than 0.5 percent of GDP), women business owners are somewhat more likely to sell products or services that require the use of new technology.
Why this difference? One simple reason: Where supportive work-family policies are not present, women are more likely to pursue entrepreneurship as a fallback employment strategy rather than an active choice. For instance, my analysis shows that when governments devote minimal public spending to childcare, women entrepreneurs are substantially more likely to report having turned toward entrepreneurship because of a need for a better employment situation than are women entrepreneurs whose governments provide more generous child care supports. In the absence of supportive family policies, women are more likely to pursue self-employment out of the need for greater control over their schedules, hours, and the physical location of work.
The problem is that when individuals pursue entrepreneurship out of a need for greater work-family balance rather than out of a desire to respond to a specific business opportunity, that often involves working with a small business attorney to register trademarks to cover the intellectual property for developing businesses. They tend to start smaller, less lucrative, and less aggressively growth-oriented businesses.
My research challenges the usual opposition posited between policies adopted to further free enterprise and those adopted to extend family-friendly protections to the traditional workforce. By giving the average woman a broader menu of attractive opportunities in standard employment, supportive work-family policies actually increase the chances that, when a women does pursue entrepreneurship, she will be motivated not by a lack of attractive employment options, but by a desire to build an organization that will have a distinct impact on the economy and job growth.
Implications
These findings suggest that free market advocates and proponents of public spending should recognize common interests. Where supportive family policies are lacking, women may achieve higher but not better levels of representation in entrepreneurship. By reducing barriers to employment, supportive work-family policies promote women’s engagement in the types of aggressive, innovative, and growth-oriented types of entrepreneurship that are arguably so critical to economic growth. This happens because having access to work-family policies minimizes the chances that a woman will find herself in a situation in which she needs to turn to self-employment as a fallback strategy for reconciling work and family demands-and thus, the chances that she will find herself vulnerable to the financial instability that is often part and parcel to small, low-growth forms of self-employment. For instance, in the US, women-owned firms have been struggling more in recent years than in the past, a trend that fuels women’s lower incomes. Yet, growth-oriented women entrepreneurs have been found to be among the happiest workers in our economy. So the message is clear: let’s work toward policies that expand the menu of options for women workers-and therefore promote entrepreneurship as an opportunity-driven choice-rather than policies that limit these options and, as a result, reinforce existing gender inequalities in the labor force.
This study is forthcoming in the November 2015 issue of Administrative Science Quarterly.
For further information, contact:
Sarah Thébaud
Assistant Professor of Sociology and Research Associate at the Broom Center for Demography
University of California, Santa Barbara
For the Council on Contemporary Families press advisory visit:
https://contemporaryfamilies.org/family-friendly-and-women-entrepreneurs-advisory/
November 5, 2015
For Immediate Release
Contact: Virginia Rutter / Framingham State University Sociology
vrutter@gmail.com / 206 375 4139
New from CCF: November is National Entrepreneurship Month
What Promotes Women’s Business Innovation and Growth?
November 5, 2015, Austin, TX— Americans have always valued the free enterprise system for encouraging innovative start-ups. Silicon Valley is an example of how such entrepreneurship can create technological breakthroughs and produce new jobs. But Silicon Valley is also a good example of how men entrepreneurs typically attract larger funding and produce more aggressive, growth-oriented businesses than women.
According to “What Helps Women Entrepreneurs Flourish?”, a new briefing report released today for the Council on Contemporary Families, the U.S. has a higher proportion of women entrepreneurs than many other countries, but a lower proportion of those women-owned businesses generate high levels of income and job creation.
The new study suggests a surprising reason for these differences, and an even more surprising solution. Sociologist Sarah Thébaud (UC-Santa Barbara), analyzed survey data from 24 countries—including the U.S.—between 2001 and 2008. She found that the absence of family-friendly work policies in the traditional workforce prompts many women to start their own businesses in the hope of gaining more control over their work schedules and locations. But, Thébaud discovered, when women pursue entrepreneurship as a fallback strategy for employment, “rather than in direct response to a business opportunity they perceive, they tend to start smaller, less lucrative, and less aggressively growth-oriented businesses.” This actually reinforces women’s second-class economic status.
By contrast, when countries offer more generous family-friendly policies, fewer women feel compelled to leave the traditional workforce in order to get more family time. But the women who do start their own businesses tend to scale-up and create larger, higher-impact enterprises. In fact, Thébaud found, in countries where governments mandate generous amounts of paid family leave, “women business owners employ more workers, express bigger growth intentions, and are more likely to report introducing a brand new product or service to the market” than in countries without such family-friendly policies.
A false choice. In other words, debates over whether we should encourage private enterprise or support government-mandated family-friendly work policies may involve a false choice. Thébaud concludes that “free market advocates and proponents of public spending should recognize common interests… By reducing barriers to employment, supportive work-family policies promote women’s engagement in the types of aggressive, innovative, and growth-oriented types of entrepreneurship that are arguably so critical to economic growth.” That may be why a recent survey of U.S. small businesses showed that a massive majority support national paid family leave.
For further information, contact:
Sarah Thébaud
Assistant Professor of Sociology and Research Associate at the Broom Center for Demography
University of California, Santa Barbara
LINKS:
CCF BRIEF: What Helps Women Entrepreneurs Flourish?
https://contemporaryfamilies.org/family-friendly-and-women-entrepreneurs-brief/
CCF ADVISORY: What Promotes Women’s Business Innovation and Growth?
https://contemporaryfamilies.org/family-friendly-and-women-entrepreneurs-advisory/
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The Council on Contemporary Families, based at the University of Texas-Austin, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization of family researchers and practitioners that seeks to further a national understanding of how America’s families are changing and what is known about the strengths and weaknesses of different family forms and various family interventions.
The Council helps keep journalists informed of notable work on family-related issues via the CCF Network. To join the CCF Network, or for further media assistance, please contact Stephanie Coontz, Director of Research and Public Education, at coontzs@msn.com, cell 360-556-9223.
Follow us! @CCF_Families and https://www.facebook.com/contemporaryfamilies
Read our blog Families as They Really Are – www.thesocietypages.org/families
November 5, 2015
