Abstract
This paper focuses on an underrepresented topic in gender and entrepreneurship research – the connections between work-life balance and the welfare state for copreneur couples in the Czech Republic (CR). After 40 years of interruption, women and men in the CR rediscovered entrepreneurial opportunities.
Although like other European nations, women CR business-owners remain underrepresented (29% in 2011), they constitute a significant part of the growing numbers of CR entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship inequalities are associated with problems that plague Czech working women generally--gender employment gaps, labor market segregation, and gender stereotypes.
Social policies that pertain to work-life balance, childcare and parents’ working conditions also shape both women’s employment and entrepreneurship. Prior research has documented the ways in which welfare state provisions affect the employment patterns and experiences of CR women in the wage labor market.
This paper aims to investigate how welfare state provisions may affect and be utilized by copreneur couples. Our research is based on 24 interviews with 12 CR copreneurial couples conducted in 2012.
Copreneurs are romantic couples who own and operate small businesses together. Businesses were selected from trade and service sectors through a snowball sampling method, and male and female partners were each interviewed separately.
Interviews focused on the history and nature of the businesses and the ways in which couples divided labor and responsibilities for work and home. As we noted previously (Jurik, Křížková, Dlouhá forthcoming), the domestic sphere especially childcare, was a far more prominent topic in women’s than in men’s narratives.