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The purpose of this paper is to explore and discuss to what extent and why women's entrepreneurship contributes to rural economic viability and gender equality in an advanced welfare state.

The authors use detailed register data to explore men's and women's rural businesses in the most common industries for rural women entrepreneurs in the Swedish welfare state. Based on a literature review, the authors develop hypotheses and analyse how family, business and industry factors influence earnings.

Women's rural entrepreneurship is important for rural viability, as women's businesses provide a wide range of services necessary for life in rural areas. Although women's rural businesses are not significantly smaller than those of men, women's income is lower and more sensitive to business and industry variables. Marriage has positive effects for the earnings of men but negative effects for the earnings of women. The authors argue that the results are contingent on the gendering of entrepreneurship and industries, as well as on the local rural gender contracts. For these reasons, the importance of women entrepreneurs for rural viability is not reflected in their own incomes. Hence, women's rural entrepreneurship does not result in (economic) gender equality.

Entrepreneurship scholars rarely explore women's rural entrepreneurship, and particularly not in the Global North or Western welfare states. Therefore, this empirical study from Sweden provides novel information on how the gender order on the business, industry and family levels influences the income of men and women entrepreneurs differently.

The purpose of this article is to use quantitative empirical data to analyse the degree of resilience, as well as change or reproduction of the gender order, in the era of New Public Management. The propositions are constructed based on liberal- and socialist-feminist perspectives, and discussed in light of the empirical results.

We report from a longitudinal quantitative study of female-dominated welfare industries. Data, available from Statistics Sweden, include the total population of entrepreneurs available on the individual level. However, the level of analysis that was used in the study was in accordance with the industry level. Data were processed from an aggregated level to the most detailed level of classification.

The findings reveal resilience in the prevailing gender order. The order is being reproduced in the entrepreneurship context, in most of the industries that were studied.

The results may potentially have profound impact on entrepreneurship policy, equality policy and public sector restructuring.

This quantitative longitudinal study shows a complex pattern on the detailed industry level, which can be understood in terms of male gender labelling of entrepreneurship. The results thus support previous qualitative studies that have observed this phenomenon. Methodologically, this paper contributes to the field by showing that without breaking down the analysis into the different female-dominated industries on a five-digit level, the various results of the public sector reforms and the attendant gendered effects would not have been revealed.