ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we investigate a particular type of women entrepreneurship, i.e. professional entrepreneurship of women. Acknowledging that women entrepreneurship is largely based on family-related origins, we contend that family embeddedness is a crucial factor for professional entrepreneurship of women, instantiated by self-employment of female professionals. In particular, we examine the impacts of three aspects of family embeddedness on self-employment of women professionals: perceived work-life balance, wifehood and motherhood, and family legacy. For the empirical analyses on the relationship between family embeddedness and self-employment of professional women, we use a database, called After the JD, to collect the career history of female lawyers in the U.S. surveyed between 2003 and 2006. From the database, we trace the career paths of female lawyers, identifying whether the given female lawyer selects self-employment as her career option. Then, by using a logistic regression model, we estimate the probability of self-employment with respect to the variables of perceived work-life balance, wifehood and motherhood, and family legacy. As a result, we find that female lawyers who regard work-life balance important for their career choice and those who are situated in wifehood are likely to become self-employed. Meanwhile, female lawyers who are situated in motherhood and whose parents or grandparents are also lawyers are reluctant to become self-employed. These findings indicate that family embeddedness plays a critical role in the professional entrepreneurship of women and further suggests that self-employment of professionals can be a gendered type of entrepreneurship.
