Home-Preneurs Want It All
An increasing number of Canadian mothers are taking up entrepreneurship, hoping to find a better work-life balance to raise their children, studies show. Known as mompreneurs, these women’s quests for the best way to combine parenting with a career is a decades old one.
Through the 1980s and ’90s there was the career Supermom, whose answer to the dilemma was super-multitasking and heroic time management. She was said to be untiring, ambitious and successful. And oh-so-organized. She could bring home the bacon, fry it up in her immaculate kitchen holding a toddler on her hip — and then dress up for an evening out.Supermom ended up frazzled and started demanding husbands take their share in housework and caregiving.
The promise of work-life balance and successful mompreneurship is one Barbara Orser, a professor at the University of Ottawa’s School of Management who has researched female entrepreneurship, doesn’t buy. For starters, mompreneurs tend to start low-margin, low-growth businesses, work long hours, make very little money and lose out on benefits. Data from Statistics Canada show only 17% of self-employed women earn more than $30,000 a year. “And when women step out of the workforce, they don’t catch up later on. I think there’s a real financial and career cost that has to be weighed carefully,” Ms. Orser says.
It’s a cost women increasingly seem willing to pay. Between 1996 and 2006, the number of self-employed women grew 18%, while the growth rate for self-employed men was 14%. Nearly one-third of the women who make up about a third of self-employed people in the country, have children under the age of 12, according to a CIBC study. Often, mompreneurs launch their businesses when their children are born, and they have no childcare. They work during nap time, between diaper changes and at night.
Photo by .Fabio
No comments yet.
Leave a Reply