Picture two women in different countries, both weighing whether to work for themselves. One lives in a place where taking chances is generally applauded. The other lives somewhere that prizes stability and predictable routines. When each of them gets married, does that decision change their odds of striking out on their own in the same way? A new study suggests the answer depends heavily on the surrounding culture.
Writing in Small Business Economics, economists Nabamita Dutta of the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and Joshua D. Ammons of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga set out to make sense of a puzzle that has divided earlier researchers. Some studies find that marriage helps women’s entrepreneurship by adding financial support, extra labor, and emotional backing. Others find that marriage holds women back through household duties and social expectations. Dutta and Ammons argue that both can be true, and that the missing piece is the cultural setting in which marriage plays out.
The question behind the study
Women tend to start businesses at lower rates than men. The researchers wanted to understand when marriage widens that gap and when it barely matters. Their central idea centers on a cultural trait that the social scientist Geert Hofstede called “uncertainty avoidance.”
Uncertainty avoidance describes how comfortable people in a society are with ambiguity and unstructured situations. It is not the same as calculated financial risk. Rather, it captures a general unease with the unknown. In places with low uncertainty avoidance, people tend to accept change and experimentation. In places with high uncertainty avoidance, people lean toward rules, routines, and predictability. Prior work has linked lower uncertainty avoidance to higher rates of innovation and opportunity-driven business activity.
One clarification matters here. The study measures self-employment, meaning working for oneself rather than for an employer, which is the standard comparable indicator available in the data. That is related to entrepreneurship but not identical, since entrepreneurship often implies innovation and growth. The authors are careful to say their findings speak to whether women work for themselves, not to how successful their ventures become.
How they investigated it
Dutta and Ammons drew on the World Values Survey, one of the largest cross-national surveys of people’s beliefs and attitudes. It has been collected in seven waves stretching from 1981 through 2022 and covers 108 countries. Their main analysis used individual responses from about 142,922 people across 78 countries.
Their outcome measure was simple: whether a person reported being self-employed. About 11.4 percent of the sample was. They then looked at three factors together: whether a respondent was female, whether the respondent was married, and how uncertainty-avoidant the person was. For their main measure of uncertainty avoidance, they used a survey item asking how much respondents valued “adventure and taking risks.” People who said this was “not at all like me” or “not like me” were treated as more uncertainty-avoiding.
To keep other explanations from muddying the picture, the researchers controlled for age, education, the presence and number of children, and self-reported social class. They also accounted for stable differences between countries and for common trends within each survey wave. In later rounds of analysis, they added controls for trust, attitudes toward work, religious affiliation, individualism, political leanings, a sense of personal control, and views on income inequality.
What the analysis revealed
The first finding echoed earlier research: marriage is linked to a lower likelihood of self-employment for women relative to men. Married women showed a larger gap than unmarried women.
The more original result concerns how that gap shifts with culture. In cultures with low uncertainty avoidance, where risk-taking is generally accepted, married women were 9.4 to 9.7 percent less likely to be self-employed than men. Unmarried women in those same cultures faced roughly half that disadvantage, around 4.5 to 4.8 percent. In other words, marriage roughly doubled the gender gap.
In cultures with high uncertainty avoidance, the pattern looked different. There, both married and unmarried women were about 7 percent less likely to be self-employed than men, and marriage added little on top of that.
The authors interpret this as a matter of opportunity costs. In risk-tolerant cultures, women who are not married may be inclined toward business ownership, so the domestic obligations that often accompany marriage represent a heavier sacrifice of something they might otherwise pursue. In risk-averse cultures, they argue, the general discomfort with uncertainty already dampens women’s inclination toward self-employment, so marriage does not change much beyond that baseline.
To test how sturdy these results were, the researchers ran several additional checks. They used matching models, a technique that compares people with similar observed characteristics to better isolate the association tied to being a married woman. Those models produced results consistent with the main analysis. They also tried alternative measures of uncertainty avoidance based on distrust in institutions such as courts, companies, the United Nations, and political parties.
Most of these confirmed that being female and being a married woman were linked to lower self-employment. One measure, distrust in the United Nations, produced a reversed pattern in which marriage imposed a larger disadvantage in high uncertainty-avoidance settings. The authors take this as a sign that “uncertainty avoidance” is a many-sided concept, and different measures may capture different things.
What it might mean, and what it does not
For people thinking about policy, the authors suggest that efforts to close gender gaps in business ownership may need to fit their setting. In risk-tolerant societies, programs might focus on easing the demands that marriage places on women’s time and resources. In more risk-averse societies, the barriers may lie elsewhere.
The researchers spend a portion of the paper cautioning against reading too much into their averages. Drawing on ethnographic work about market women in Ghana, they note that the same institution of marriage can operate in opposite ways for different women. One woman may find a husband draining her capital, while another may find her spouse’s connections open doors. “The same institution of marriage operates entirely differently for each woman,” they write, arguing that cultural context shapes the range of likely outcomes without dictating any single life.
Several limits deserve attention. The study is cross-sectional, meaning it captures a snapshot rather than following individuals over time, so it cannot establish that marriage causes changes in self-employment. Throughout, the relationships are associations rather than proven cause and effect. The data also treat marriage as a simple yes-or-no status, missing differences in how equally couples divide household labor. And the analysis cannot separate business ownership driven by opportunity from that driven by economic necessity, though the authors added controls for income and cash shortfalls and found their core pattern held.
What the study offers, in the end, is a way to reconcile years of conflicting findings. By treating culture not as background noise but as something that shapes how marriage and gender interact, Dutta and Ammons suggest that the question is less about whether marriage helps or hurts women’s self-employment and more about where, and under what cultural conditions, its effects are felt most strongly.
