Boys, Don’t Cry! How Entrepreneurial Traits Affect Crowd-Financed Microlending

Prior research shows a strong association between entrepreneurship and agentic-masculine traits such as positivity, competence, and creativity, and practice focuses on sharpening pitches to emphasize these entrepreneurial traits, even in the context of small-scale entrepreneurship. But do such pitches help women entrepreneurs? We rely on attribution, gender and role expectation, and expectancy violation theories to predict that women entrepreneurs, and especially women who display entrepreneurial traits in their pitches, fit the role expectations of entrepreneurs in the microlending context, and benefit from the fastest funding speeds. We find support for these predictions in a dataset involving 600,000 entrepreneurial pitches. Our research on gender and crowd-financed microlending shows how, unlike in the commercial entrepreneurship context, displays of entrepreneurial traits, like positivity, provide women a funding advantage in microlending.