Family Business Online and Offline: Gender Inequalities and Regional Disparities in China

Family business has been an important economic engine under China's market reform, but little is known about how family business has evolved under the rise of online entrepreneurship, which may help to undermine the related gender gap and regional disparities in entrepreneurial activities or reinforce existing social inequalities. This study examines whether and how online and offline family businesses illustrate different patterns of regional disparities and gender inequalities at the regional level and at the individual level. At the regional level, the distribution of offline family businesses suggests a positive sex ratio effect and a negative education effect. These effects are not significant for the distribution of online family businesses; instead, access to the Internet and technology matters more in the development of online entrepreneurship across different areas. At the individual level, the gender gap and regional effects persist in the baseline model, but the two types of family businesses illustrate different gendered patterns regarding the effects of socioeconomic and demographic factors in separate models. Online family businesses allow people to be less constrained by marital status, health status, and family care burden, which continue to contribute to gender differences in offline businesses. Some other effects, however, become more gendered in online businesses: men have a higher chance of online business involvement based on greater human capital and women are more likely to run online business when living in western areas, which may reflect men's education -facilitated market adventures and women's resilient agency in places of limited opportunities. The mixed patterns reflect how regional disparities, opportunity structures, family dynamics, and gender inequalities interact in complicated ways.