Entrepreneurship, gender, and marriage: navigating uncertainty

Abstract The relationship between marriage and female entrepreneurship remains inconclusive in existing literature. We address this ambiguity by examining the moderating role of uncertainty avoidance using individual-level data for countries over time waves from World Values Survey (WVS) database. Our findings demonstrate that uncertainty avoidance significantly moderates the relationship between marriage and self-employment. While marriage is negatively associated with self-employment for women more than men, this effect varies systematically with cultural context. In low uncertainty-avoidance cultures, married women are 9.4 to 9.7% less likely to be self-employed compared to men, whereas unmarried women experience approximately half this effect (4.5 to 4.8%). Conversely, in high uncertainty-avoidance cultures, the self-employment likelihood for both married and unmarried women converge at approximately 7% lower than for men, with marriage having minimal additional impact. The findings remain robust as we establish identification by addressing omitted variable bias through controls for education, trust, individualism, work attitudes, ideology, and religiosity.