Women’s entrepreneurship at the top of the pyramid remains an under-studied topic. The motivations of women entrepreneurs in elite family settings, particularly in those ‘one percent wealth households,’ present a compelling paradox, given the often-heightened adherence to traditional gender roles within these contexts. This study looks at how the context of elite families shapes women's entrepreneurial aspirations and approaches and contributes to the understanding of social class, gender, and entrepreneurship. Drawing upon a family embeddedness perspective and qualitative research design, we examine why women entrepreneurs from Chinese elite family backgrounds create enterprises. Our analytical framework examines the interconnectedness of the individual entrepreneur (micro level), the elite family context (meso level), and the broader societal environment (macro level), illustrating the interactions between these levels. We show that women entrepreneurs adopt an integrated view towards pursuing individual and family-oriented goals through entrepreneurship, which are sometimes in tension with one another. To harmonize these two objectives, they adopt strategies that combine self-emancipation with conformity to established gender roles, support family businesses through their own ventures, and accumulate social, cultural, and political capital through entrepreneuring that could elevate families’ social status.
