Exploration of Impact of Distant Family Support on Chinese Migrant Women Entrepreneurs’ Motivation

Over the last few decades, migration has been on the rise. 23 million people (5.1 %) of the 447.3 million people living in the EU on 1st January 2020 were non-EU citizens (Eurostat, 2021). For instance, in Germany alone, until 2021, 10,969 women with migration background in the wider sense are reported to live in Germany, consisting of one fourth of the whole female population in the country (German national statistic department, 2022). As a consequence, the rise of migrant entrepreneurship — small business activities carried out by migrants in their destination countries — has become the focus of a large body of academic research (Barberis and Solano, 2018). Despite the prosperous development of scholarships available in the domain of migrant entrepreneurship, scarce attention has been paid to the gendered nature of it. The theoretical progress of the concept of migrant entrepreneurship has also been constrained within a normative explanation relating to male entrepreneurs (Vershinina and Cruz, 2021). Entrepreneurship is argued to provide ‘flexibility’, ‘autonomy’ and ‘empowerment’ for female entrepreneurs as they are able to escape from male domination in their occupations to achieve i.e., breaking the ‘glass ceiling’ and generally living within their societies more confidently (Alkhaled and Berglund, 2018). The advantage of female migrant entrepreneurship includes, flexibility guaranteed by running a business, which has given women more chances to reconcile conflicts between work and family, and this has been mostly addressed in the literature (De Luca and Ambrosini, 2019). In this vein, a family embeddedness perspective (Aldrich & Cliff, 2003) posits that families and businesses are interwoven bodies, and that family dynamics impinge on fundamental entrepreneurial processes.