Motherhood and Women’s Self-Employment: Theory and Evidence from Nigeria

Abstract

The literature holds that having young children pushes women into self-employment to reconcile motherhood demands with their professional ambitions. However, knowledge gaps remain on how this effect differs by social context. Using nationally representative data from Nigeria, this paper demonstrates that motherhood has no statistically significant impact on women’s self-employment probabilities in a context where self-employment is predominantly informal and marriage creates extended family networks. Instead, after accounting for selection bias and the endogeneity of fertility and education decisions jointly, we find that lack of education drives up women’s self-employment probabilities in such a context. These findings are robust to alternative specifications.