Ties that bind? Kinship and female enterprise creation in rural India

Abstract

In LMICs, a large number of female run enterprises are small businesses, mostly with one employee, the female owner, which are often home based and operate outside existing regulatory systems. Within the South-Asian context, particularly, there is evidence to suggest that there are real and significant structures of constrain which act as barriers restricting women’s ability to partake in the labour force. However, this literature is focused on the individual female and her ability to independently pursue employment opportunities. Rarely have the interdependent dynamics of the household context in which female entrepreneurs are embedded and the influence on the household- business nexus been considered. In this paper we focus on this dynamics, specifically on husband’s education, occupation, income and family wealth. We investigate this through unique data collected from over 9800 women belonging to Self Help Groups in the district of Kolar, Karnataka, India. Our main results reveal that husband’s secure occupation and the SHG groups’ husband’s average income support female enterprise creation. In-laws living in the household, when husbands are securely employed, are barriers to female enterprise creation. However, when husbands are securely employed and women have higher agency & decision making ability, it adds to female enterprise creation.