Abstract
This chapter finds that women’s more conservative business strategy of purchasing existing shops, rather than starting firms from scratch, mitigates some of the disadvantages that they face. Somewhat surprisingly, we find that their odds of firm-level success improve with marriage, a result likely due to the increased financial and labor resources of a marital partner. Our intersectional analysis also finds that gender effects are class specific. Mexican immigrant women entrepreneurs whose parents were business owners performed better in business than did their more working-class counterparts. However, like the men, their small firms hired more employees when they conducted business in less segregated and less impoverished neighborhoods.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Pierre Bourdieu is certainly an intersectional theorist whose work is relevant to the study of gender and even race and ethnicity. In an essay on masculine domination, Bourdieu explained “I am going to try to show that... masculine domination...is a particular and particularly effective form of symbolic violence (other examples of which might be found in the domination of one ethnicity over another or of one class over another through culture, for example)” (2002: 227; Translation, Warren Montag).
- 3.
We see some evidence for this type of pattern in our data. Although our data do not indicate the benefactors, two men in our sample said that they inherited their business. None of the women in our sample reported an inheritance.
- 4.
Sociologists (see Irene Browne and Joya Misra 2003; Patricia Hill Collins 2015; Salcido and MenjĂvar 2012) and, to a lesser extent, economists (see Brewer et al. 2002 for a review of the literature) have pursued intersectional analyses. An intersectional approach examines the interconnectedness of race, gender, and/or class in creating unique labor market experiences. For example, Kim (2009) finds evidence that black women in the US suffer from three earnings penalties: gender, race, and the intersection of race and gender. The author similarly finds that black women experience a 15% earnings penalty due to gender, a 9% penalty due to their race, but a separate 3% penalty as a result of the intersection of race and gender. This last penalty is due to the unique experience of being a black woman. Thus, the total amount of labor market discrimination is greater than the sum of the race and gender components.
- 5.
See https://linkbusiness.com.au/knowledge-center/Starting-a-New-Venture-vs-Buying-an-Existing-Business for a summary of the costs and benefits of purchasing an existing business.
- 6.
One possibility might be that women purchase businesses in which they once worked.
- 7.
The self-employment rates of other atypical agents, such as divorced women or those without young children, also rose in this period, as did the earnings from their businesses.
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Trevizo, D., Lopez, M. (2018). Gendered Differences Among Mexican Immigrant Shopkeepers. In: Neighborhood Poverty and Segregation in the (Re-)Production of Disadvantage. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73715-7_5
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