Gendered transitions to self-employment and business ownership: a linked-lives perspective
利用英国家庭追踪调查数据，发现生育第二个孩子显著提高女性自雇和商业所有权的概率，而男性则不受影响；伴侣的工作时长会促使双方转向自雇，但女性更可能拥有长时间工作的伴侣。
We apply the sociological lens of linked lives to show how household contexts channel transitions to self-employment in ways strongly differentiated by gender. We investigate the impact of demographic transitions to marriage, cohabitation and having children on the transition to selfemployment using fixed-effects models on 10 waves of the UK's nationally representative survey, Understanding Society. Men's transitions to selfemployment and separately to business ownership are remarkably impervious to the arrival of a new child in the household. In contrast, second births raise the odds of self-employment for women and have a strong and statistically significant association with business ownership, highlighting the role of birth parity as a household influence. Within the subset of opposite-sex couples, lives are indeed linked: a partner's long hours precipitate the other partner's transition into self-employment for men and women. However, the effect is asymmetric to the extent that women are much more likely to have a partner working long hours. Marriage is associated with a much higher likelihood of transitioning to business ownership for both men and women, which does not hold for selfemployment overall.