Gender and social entrepreneurship fundraising: A mission drift perspective

• Female entrepreneurs have an advantage over their male counterparts in raising funds for hybrid social ventures. • The female advantage exists because female social entrepreneurs can alleviate investors’ concern over entrepreneurs’ mission drift. • Female social entrepreneurs are perceived to have a lower risk of mission drift because they are perceived to have stronger prosocial motivation. • Three studies support the proposed gender effect, but findings regarding the moderating role of nonprofit experience remain inconclusive. • Supplemental studies show that the female advantage exists in gender-neutral and women-dominated industries but not men-dominated ones. An increasing number of entrepreneurs are pursuing social welfare goals using viable revenue-generating business models to sustain operations—a practice known as social entrepreneurship. In this research, we highlight that such a hybrid model of entrepreneurship raises funders’ concerns over mission drift (i.e., entrepreneurs prioritizing financial gain at the expense of social missions) and examine how these concerns create a unique gender disparity in social venture fundraising. Integrating the mission drift literature and social role theory, we posit that female entrepreneurs are better positioned to alleviate funders’ concerns over mission drift as they are perceived as having stronger prosocial motivation. As a result, they will garner more financial support for their early-stage hybrid social ventures relative to their male counterparts. We further propose that this female advantage may diminish when social entrepreneurs have nonprofit work experience that signals their commitment to social missions. Findings from archival field data of 262 social crowdfunding campaigns (Study 1) and two preregistered experiments (Studies 2 and 3) provide rigorous empirical evidence for the proposed gender effect on social entrepreneurial fundraising and its underlying mechanisms. However, the findings on the moderating effects of nonprofit work experience across studies remain inconclusive. This research sheds light on how the hybrid nature of social enterprises recalibrates evaluations and gender dynamics in fundraising, thereby providing a more nuanced understanding of gender and entrepreneurial financing.