Gender Performance Gap: The Causal Effect of the “No Choice” Option on the ‘Underperformance’ of Women-owned Businesses in Patriarchal Societies

The scholarly interest and activity in women entrepreneurship domain has seen dramatic expansion in the last decade, allowing scholars to synthesise findings from both empirical and conceptual work. While this helped to consolidate knowledge about women’s entrepreneurship, it also highlighted the need for new directions to capture the ‘heterogeneity’ of the composition of women’s entrepreneurship. Given the need for progressive and complementary additive studies that connects and build upon previous works, this paper explores the overlapping domains of women entrepreneurship and family businesses. The literature on family businesses increasing highlights the invisibility of women and a paradox where women’s engagement in entrepreneurial activity is increasing at an exponential rate yet women remain economically disenfranchised. This micro-sociological research paper adopts a correlational approach to consider micro concepts such as gender, social class and economic empowerment / independence in the context of family businesses. The findings reveal that mostly, women’s engagement in family business (especially in patriarchal societies, is largely sacrificial as their motivation for taking up positions in family business is the ‘family good’ and not self-actualisation.