Women Entrepreneurs Are More Successful Than Men in Raising Money on Crowdfunding Platforms

A new study conducted by researchers at Louisiana State University, Indiana University, and Suffolk University in Boston, finds that women entrepreneurs are more successful than their male counterparts in gaining support through crowdfunding platforms.

Researchers found that while women seeking funds for start-up ventures have been at a disadvantage to men with traditional funding sources. But crowdfunding investors take the opposite view. These investors tend to believe women are more trustworthy and therefore they are more likely to get funding from these crowdfunding investors. The researchers analyzed three years of data from Kickstarter, a popular crowdfunding platform. They examined the entrepreneurs’ gender, the financial backing received and funding success in a sample of 416 projects.

Michael Johnson, an assistant professor of management in the College of Business at Louisiana State University and the lead author of the study, states that “historically, funding from banks, private equity and venture capital is more likely to go to men because of a stereotypical perception that they make more competent entrepreneurs. In contrast, crowdfunding investors see female entrepreneurs as more trustworthy, and this perception leads to higher overall investment in female-led ventures over male-led ventures. In this instance, gender bias works in their favor.”

The full study, “A Woman’s Place Is in the… Startup! Crowdfunder Judgments, Implicit Bias, and the Stereotype Content Model,” was recently published on the website of the Journal of Business Venturing. It may be accessed here.