A woman's place is in the… startup! Crowdfunder judgments, implicit bias, and the stereotype content model

By Michael A. Johnson, Regan M. Stevenson, C. Letwin. Journal of Business Venturing, 2018

247 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We examine investor stereotypes and implicit bias in crowdfunding decisions. Prior research in formal venture capital settings demonstrates that investors tend to have a funding bias against women. However, in crowdfunding – wherein a ‘crowd’ of amateur investors make relatively small investments in new companies – our empirical observations reveal a funding advantage for women. We explain the causal mechanism underlying this counterintuitive finding by drawing upon stereotype content theory and testing a dual path moderated-mediation model. Based on archival data and a follow-up experiment, our findings suggest common gender biases held by amateur investors function to increase female stereotype perceptions in the form of trustworthiness judgments, which subsequently increases investors' willingness to invest in early-stage women-led ventures. We discuss our results with specific attention to how our findings extend the entrepreneurship funding literature as well as the gender dynamics literature in entrepreneurship and organization research more broadly.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management Information Systems, Management of Technology and Innovation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/890fca1af19451ee6119160c426c9d300fedd2e3

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. E. Stam
2. F. Polzin
3. Romi Kher
4. Wanxiang Cai
5. Shu Yang
6. Scott L. Newbert
7. E. Malecki
8. Andrew H. Van de Ven

In Management Information Systems

1. F. Polzin
2. Romi Kher
3. Wanxiang Cai
4. Shu Yang
5. E. Stam
6. Scott L. Newbert

In Management of Technology and Innovation

1. F. Polzin
2. Romi Kher
3. Shu Yang
4. E. Stam
5. Scott L. Newbert
6. E. Malecki
7. Andrew H. Van de Ven
8. Ron A. Boschma

Citations in the corpus

• Crowdfunding and social capital: A systematic review using a dynamic perspective (2021, background): “Reporting on the results of a lab experiment, Johnson et al. (2018) find that female fundraisers are perceived as being more trustworthy than males and are thus more likely to succeed.”
• What signals matter for social startups? It depends: The influence of gender role congruity on social impact accelerator selection decisions (2019, background): “More recently, however, scholars have begun to examine the investment decisions of non-traditional investors, such as microlenders and crowdfunders, that tend to base their decisions on signals communicating a venture’s potential for social impact (e.g., Greenberg and Mollick, 2017; Johnson et al., ”