Victoria Price presented a new conference paper from her PhD research at the Annual Conference of the Institute of Small Business and Entrepreneurship (ISBE) in Newcastle, on the 14th of November 2019. The paper, which is co-authored with Darja Reuschke, was presented to the Gender & Enterprise Special Interest Group (SIG), on the topic of âInnovation & Performance in Women-Owned Home-Based Businessesâ. The presentation focused on findings from empirical analysis using the 2015 UK Longitudinal Small Business Survey (LSBS). The results show that contrary to previous studies, women-owned home-based businesses (HBBs) do not have lower performance than men-owned home-based businesses in turnover or innovation and quite the opposite, are more likely to be employers.
Presenting at ISBE was a great opportunity for Victoria as an early career researcher, to develop her presentation skills, disseminate her research, and gain valuable and insightful feedback on the findings from her PhD so far. The presentation was well received by the academic experts, policy makers and practitioners within the audience. In particular, the employment measure used in the analysis that includes subcontractor employeesâ and regular employees garnered interest, with business owners and practitioners recounting personal experiences of choosing to subcontract out work rather than taking on full employees. Further discussions focused on the role of gendered industrial segregation within the performance debate, and possible future research directions â notably, the use of the LSBS data to investigate the spatial growth of home-based businesses out of the home.
The full title of the paper is âPerformance and Innovation in Women-Owned Home-Based Businesses: Exploring the Gender-Location Linkâ. The paper contains additional analysis and discusses in more detail the role of business location in the gendered performance debate and the home-based business sector. It is available in the conference app to all ISBE delegates and members. https://isbe.org.uk/resources/conference-papers/
The presentation slides can be downloaded here:
