The Price of Flexibility: Exploring the Realities of Motherhood and Entrepreneurship
5 min read · Jan 2025
Carrigan, Marylyn, and Joanne Duberley (2013)
Mothers often take on entrepreneurship to find flexibility to care for their children and support their partners.
Summary
Some women working corporate jobs turn to entrepreneurship during motherhood for more flexibility. Do mothers who choose this path realize these benefits? Yes, this study finds that mothers note that their entrepreneurial ambitions are secondary to raising a child. That withstanding, they report frustration with how their entrepreneurial ambitions are sidelined within the household. This research examines the reasons and overall experience of mother entrepreneurs.
Method
The study examined how women allocate their time across tasks and roles as both mothers and entrepreneurs and the context that influenced these decisions. The authors conducted 20 face-to-face in-depth, open-ended interviews with mothers in the city, towns and rural locations of the Midlands region of the UK. While the sample was non-random, the authors sought out a diverse population that shared various contrasting opinions. The authors coded transcripts separately and came together to note emerging themes.
Key Findings
For many mothers, the entrepreneur role is secondary to the caregiver role.
Women in the sample reported leaving corporate jobs to take on more parenting responsibilities.
Entrepreneurship allowed mothers to keep contributing financially to the household while maintaining a degree of control and flexibility over time commitments.
One respondent shared, "It’s all about the children, really, primarily because I can do all this stuff at school and be the mum in the audience.”
Women reported working more irregular hours as entrepreneurs than as corporate employees.
Women report that their decision to enter entrepreneurship was shaped by intra-household bargaining.
For most women, entering entrepreneurship was a joint decision made with their partners.
Still, as a result of being an entrepreneur, women reported being treated as the more flexible partners, which led to tensions and frustration with their partners.
In one respondent’s view: “Yeah. People don’t fit around me; I fit around people. I find that… I think most women do that. You put yourself last, don’t you?”
Women report that men are often uncomfortable with the tensions that arise between women’s work and childcare obligations.
A woman shared, ”On a few occasions Dave has actually said to me, ‘You should be looking after Mia, not working.' It’s also been said to me, ‘Oh, for god’s sake, can’t you just leave it alone for a day?’”
Takeaways
This study reveals that mothers often take on entrepreneurship to find flexibility to care for their children and support their partners. However, since childcare is demanding, women end up working for more and longer hours than when in previous corporate jobs. This highlights the complex challenges some working mothers face and underscores the critical need for solutions that empower mothers to achieve a work-life balance. Addressing these hurdles requires prioritizing the development of support systems that provide family support and access to revenue opportunities for female entrepreneurs.
This research underscores a pervasive, yet often overlooked disparity: women's entrepreneurial endeavours, especially those of mothers, are systematically undervalued compared to their male counterparts. While less overt than funding or support gaps, this dynamic is also detrimental. When men fail to recognize the economic significance of their partners' businesses, as evidenced in this study, it creates a significant barrier to women's full entrepreneurial potential. The notion that mothers working flexible hours are making lower financial contributions to the household is a harmful stereotype that must be challenged. Further research is needed to explore how deeply ingrained gender norms and societal expectations around family responsibilities contribute to this undervaluation, hindering women’s ability to realize their full entrepreneurial potential.
References
Carrigan, Marylyn, and Joanne Duberley. 2013. “Time Triage: Exploring the temporal strategies that support entrepreneurship and Motherhood.” Time & Society 22(1): 92–118.
About WIN-VC Canada:
New Power Labs is the research lead of the Women and Nonbinary (W) Impact (I) Network (N) for Venture Capital (VC), a national collaborative of organizations working to provide services, programming, events, and dedicated resources to women and non-binary entrepreneurs and gender lens investors across Canada who are working towards becoming investment ready and increasing the pool of investors driven to invest in these ventures.
This research is part of WIN-VC Canada, supported by the Government of Canada. WIN-VC acknowledges the support of Innovation, Science and Economic Development (ISED). ISED has awarded funding for WIN-VC that will make the venture capital environment more inclusive for women by transforming traditional investment processes, processes and knowledge into respectful and meaningful approaches that value equity and impact with a focus on diverse women and non-binary entrepreneurs and SMEs including Black communities, Indigenous peoples, racialized populations, persons with a disability, 2SLGBTQ2+ and new Canadians.
