Events

Prof. Milan Miric
Dean’s Associate Professorship in Business Administration
Associate Professor of Data Sciences and Operations
Marshall School of Business
University of Southern California

Entrepreneurship is highly uncertain, and many ventures are likely to fail. Thus, potential entrepreneurs likely consider the impact founder experience may have on their future career. Given that gender has substantial impacts on both career progression and entrepreneurial performance, we hypothesize that female and male entrepreneurs may have substantially different outcomes when they re-enter traditional employment, potentially serving as a hidden roadblock to female participation in entrepreneurship. Using data from LinkedIn’s Economic Graph Research Program, we find that when re-entering traditional employment after founding a firm former, female founders are more likely to regress and less likely to advance in their next role in traditional employment than former male founders. This significant gender penalty for female entrepreneurs, however, obscures important variation that allows us to point to potential mechanisms. We find that male entrepreneurs are substantially more likely to advance in their career relative to similar female entrepreneurs when their startup showed significant growth, but that the gender penalty for female entrepreneurs is dependent upon the gender composition of the hiring firm. Female entrepreneurs hired by firms with greater female representation are more likely to advance in their career relative to men whereas female entrepreneurs hired by firms with less female representation are less likely to advance relative to similar male entrepreneurs.