Strategies for achieving work-life balance among male and female entrepreneurs - 19 Feb 2019

Gry Agnete Alsos research the areas of entrepreneurship and innovation. Her focus areas include gender perspectives on entrepreneurship, incubators and policy means to stimulate entrepreneurship and innovation. She will present a working paper.

About the seminar and working paper 

This paper investigates the challenges men and women entrepreneurs face when combining owning and managing their firm with family responsibilities and the strategies they adopt to manage these challenges. The embeddedness of entrepreneurial activities in the family is manifested in different ways. From the firm perspective, the family sphere is often presented as a liability for the entrepreneur, for example by inflicting work-family conflicts or that domestic responsibilities decrease the human capital available to the business. However, the family also represents an asset for the entrepreneur, offering support and resources to the firm. As entrepreneurs are part of a gendered society, male and female entrepreneurs face different expectations. Hence, the challenges faced in striving to combine entrepreneurial activity with family life is likely to differ by gender. We examine the actions taken by men and women entrepreneurs in the work-family interface to deal with sometimes conflicting, sometimes mutually supportive requirements and opportunities in the firm and in the family. Building on in-depth interviews with 14 male and female entrepreneurs and family business successors of both genders, all with under-aged children, we examine the strategies they adopt to deal with sometimes conflicting, sometimes mutually supportive, requirements and opportunities in the firm and in the family. Gender influences both how the work-family challenges are interpreted and the strategies adopted to manage them.

The seminar was held in collaboration with the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship.