Internet Usage And Women's Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurial activities play an important role in promoting economic growth and raising the employment rate.Female entrepreneurship is an important part of entrepreneurial activities.But female entrepreneurial rate has remained at a low level globally.This is mainly because women are constrained by various social environments such as gender discrimination and financing difficulties,and it is difficult to obtain the resources needed for entrepreneurship.The digital economy and the online society that emerged in the early 21st century provide a new type of entrepreneurial environment for women.The Internet has a positive impact on entrepreneurial opportunities,entrepreneurial decision-making,entrepreneurial actions,and entrepreneurial outcomes.Internet technologies such as social media,e-commerce,sharing economy,and crowdfunding have effectively changed the way of opportunity identification,resource acquisition,and teamwork in the entrepreneurial process.New technologies such as the Internet offer women the possibility to break through social environmental constraints and reduce entrepreneurial costs.Above all,this article uses five-year data of China Comprehensive Social Survey(CGSS)to construct a probit model based on female individual level,empirically testing whether Internet use has a positive effect on women's entrepreneurial probability and possible mechanism.The specific contents of this article are as follows:firstly,whether the Internet uses has a positive effect on women's entrepreneurial probability;secondly,the impact of Internet usage frequency and depth on women's entrepreneurial probability;thirdly,using instrumental variable method and IVprobit model to test the endogeneity between Internet use and female entrepreneurial probability;fourthly,through the grouping of female entrepreneurs in terms of age and region,the heterogeneity of Internet use in women's entrepreneurial probability is discussed;finally,the three mechanism dimensions of human capital,social capital and information channels are discussed separately.The research results show that,in terms of average,women who use the Internet have a 3 percentage point higher probability of starting business than women who do not use the Internet.Women who use the Internet at high frequency have a higher probability of starting a business than women who use the Internet at low frequencies.At the same time,the Internet,as an emerging technology,has different effects on women of different ages and regions.By improving women's human capital and social capital,and enriching women's information channels,the Internet provides women with an online way to effectively accumulate entrepreneurial resources,thereby promoting women's entrepreneurial activities.