Daughters’ careers in family business: Motivation types and family-specific barriers

The underrepresentation of women in high-level management positions in family firms has been traditionally imputed to gender barriers, which might be specific or non-specific to family firms. Leveraging the complementarity between qualitative and quantitative data and applying Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), we find that family-specific barriers are intertwined with three types of motivation, i.e., extrinsic, intrinsic, and ethical, to predict the presence of daughters in high positions in family businesses. Three clusters have been accordingly identified, namely “no barriers”, “challengers”, and “rational”, offering alternative configurations of anthropological motivations and perceived family-specific barriers leading daughters to high positions.