What Makes Mothers Decide (Not) to Become Entrepreneurs? (Theunissen et al. 2025) | FT50 JMS

🎙️ Welcome back to Revise and Resubmit, your favorite weekday stop where research meets real life! 📚💥 Today’s episode is all about choices, challenges, and the kind of questions that live at the heart of work, family, and ambition. And trust me — this one’s gonna hit home. 🍼💼✨We’re diving into a freshly published gem from the Journal of Management Studies — yep, that’s one of the big dogs on the FT50 list 🏆 — the academic elite that sets the tone for serious global research. And this paper? It dares to ask: What makes mothers decide (not) to become entrepreneurs?📝 The study is titled “What Makes Mothers Decide (Not) to Become Entrepreneurs? Unpacking the Role of Time and Money in Parental Leave Policies” — brought to us by an amazing team of researchers: Pomme Theunissen, Julia M. Kensbock, Jens Schüler, Matthias Baum, and Ruud Gerards. These folks dug deep into data from Germany, running not one, but two rigorous studies to crack open the truth behind maternity policies and entrepreneurial ambition.Here’s what they found: It’s not really about the money. It’s about time — the time to think, to plan, to breathe. When parental leave was shortened? Women’s odds of becoming entrepreneurs dropped. When money was added, but time wasn’t? Nothing much changed. 🕰️💸In other words, the clock, not the cash, might be the real fuel for female entrepreneurship.⏳🚀This episode goes beyond numbers — it’s about the invisible negotiations mothers make every day. How much space do we give them to dream, to build, to be more than one thing at once?So here’s what I want you to think about:👉 What would happen if our systems gave mothers more time instead of just more money? Would we unlock a wave of bold new businesses the world hasn’t seen yet?💬 Huge thanks to the authors for their incredible work and to the Journal of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. for publishing this in one of the most prestigious platforms in management research.Before you go, don't forget to:🔔 Subscribe to "Revise and Resubmit" on Spotify📺 Catch us on YouTube at Weekend Researcher🎧 You can also find us on Amazon Prime Music and Apple PodcastLet’s keep asking bold questions, one paper at a time. Catch you in the next one! 💡👩‍🔬💼ReferenceTheunissen, P., Kensbock, J.M., Schüler, J., Baum, M. and Gerards, R. (2025), What Makes Mothers Decide (Not) to Become Entrepreneurs? Unpacking the Role of Time and Money in Parental Leave Policies. J. Manage. Stud.. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.13215Youtube Channel⁠https://www.youtube.com/@weekendresearcher⁠Support us on Patreonhttps://patreon.com/weekendresearcher