Female Entrepreneurship and Family Well-being in Mexico; El emprendimiento femenino y el bienestar familiar en México

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to contribute to the study of family entrepreneurship and gender by focusing on the well-being of women who engage in independent economic activity. The sample of 3156 female entrepreneurs was non-probabilistic, the data were taken from the National Survey of Income and Expenditure in the Home, analyzed using the Heckman method (Heckit) and quantile regressions. Among the main findings, we can see that women and heads of households have to work almost three times harder to cover their family expenses than the opposite gender. Slightly more than 70% of the total family expenditure is on food, followed by housing and transportation, which is an aspirational reason that stimulates female entrepreneurship out of necessity. There is a lack of orientation on the use/value of education by women, which may explain the difference in the level of well-being between the two sexes.