Equality in the Eyes of Beholders : An Ideology-Based Perspective on Gender Gap in Entrepreneurship

While the gender gap in entrepreneurship propensity has been widely acknowledged, evidence for why this gap exists is ambiguous. The dominant explanation has been grounded in a gender-role incongruity perspective, which assumes that women internalize stereotypes about the incongruity between women’s attributes and those of entrepreneurs. We question this assumption and propose a markedly distinct account centering on the gender difference in gender egalitarian (GE) ideology. GE ideology refers to the belief and value systems that support equal rights, roles, and responsibilities for men and women, and oppose the notion that men and women have innately different roles. Our key contention is that women tend to hold higher GE ideology than men, which makes them more likely to reject entrepreneurship as they disapprove the gender inequality inherent in entrepreneurship. We further build on intersectionality research to theorize the boundary condition that the gender gap in entrepreneurship via GE ideology is contingent upon other social category attributes (e.g., social class, race). Two studies—Study 1 based on secondary data of 14,030 individuals from 25 provinces in China, and Study 2 based on primary data of 1,084 individuals from 16 countries—together support our theory and its generalizability.

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