Structure or culture, push or pull? Immigrant women and entrepreneurship within the Swedish health care sector, 2002-2006

Martin Korpi, Stockholm School of Economics
Charlotta Hedberg, Stockholm University
Katarina Pettersson, Nordregio

This paper investigates motives for entrepreneurship in the health care sector in Sweden from an ethnic and a gender perspective. Based on a longitudinal database, the paper adopts a logistic regression model to investigate whether start-up motives are structurally or culturally dominated. The main finding is that, while no structural disadvantage effect is found in general, both income and unemployment rates are comparatively unfavorable for women. No additional effect is found when adding country of birth. Thus, we conclude that structural disadvantage motives, based on gender rather than ethnicity, dominate over cultural motives for entrepreneurship.