_CROSSOVERS_ _15_ and the mother or father having worked on a farm was negatively correlated with being a crossover. For the other occupational choices of parents and grandparents (not reported), we found no differences between crossovers and noncrossovers.

# 6. Husband’s Influence

Despite the finding that a woman’s early influences in life do not seem to predict the sector of operation that she enters, one repeated observation was the mention of the spouse as being an influential person in the decision to cross over. Crossovers were more likely to be married, have a business partner, and report that their husband was a business owner himself than noncrossovers. In Ethiopia, crossovers are not significantly more likely to report that they had a male role model but were more likely to mention that their husband had the idea to start the business. A pattern that emerged from the Ethiopian data and that the qualitative interviews corroborated is that the husband was often helpful in providing a market entry opportunity into the crossover sector.

To further investigate the influence of the husband, we first restricted the analysis to the sample of 511 married women and asked whether the husband was aware of the existence of the business and, if so, specifically about the ways that the husband helped with the business. Fifteen percent (77 women) of married women said that their husbands did not help with the business in any way, and 6 percent of the married sample explicitly stated that they inherited the business directly from their husband. We define a dummy variable husband ~~h~~ elped equal to 1 if the married owner said her husband had the idea to start the business, contributed money, gave advice, or helped register the business with the authorities.

Table 8, in the sample of married women, shows the influence of the husband according to crossover status. When women were asked about who had the idea to open the business, 42 percent of married crossovers said that their husband did. This is statistically significantly higher than for noncrossovers, 18 percent of whom reported that her husband had the idea to start the business. Correspondingly, crossovers were less likely to report that opening the business was their own idea than noncrossovers. Although 83 percent of married women overall report that their husbands helped in the business in some way, crossovers were significantly more likely than noncrossovers to have received help. The main channel of influence reported in the data was that the husband contributed money.

These findings suggest that the husband could have a significant role in influencing the wife’s choice of business sector and facilitating her entry into a male-dominated sector. Table 1 showed that crossover firms were more likely to explicitly report that the type of business was a “business partnership.” With respect to joint ownership, 43% of crossover firms named at least one more owner in the survey, compared with 15% of noncrossover firms.

We find evidence that, crossover or not, female entrepreneurs in the sample were actively involved in their businesses. Eighty-four percent of women in the sample reported that they were involved in the day-to-day production or service