The impact of female dominance on business resilience: A technology adoption perspective

This study explores the relationship between women entrepreneurship and business resilience, the moderation of pre-crisis and during-crisis technology adoption, and female representation in top management in the aforementioned relationship. Building on the "mom-cession" theory, the authors propose an integrated multiple-moderation model to understand the boundary conditions that can reduce the negative effect of female dominance on business resilience. Using a sample of 9035 firms across 24 countries and employing a structural equation modeling technique for model testing, this study found a negative relationship between female dominance and business resilience. Female-dominated firms led by female top managers exhibited lower business resilience. The results showed that firms' pre- and post-COVID-19 technology adoption moderated the negative relationship between female dominance and business resilience such that this relationship was weaker for firms that had already adopted technology before COVID-19 and stronger for firms that adopted technology only during COVID-19.