Words that exclude: gendered verbiage as a mechanism of entrepreneurial inequality

Gender inequality persists in entrepreneurship, yet the role of language in shaping entrepreneurial evaluations remains poorly understood. Drawing on social role theory and social dominance theory, we examine whether gendered verbiage appears in entrepreneurship texts and how such language influences new venture assessments. Using mixed-method design, we analyse popular press articles, academic research publications, and teaching cases, and conduct an experiment assessing new venture evaluations. Across all text genres, we find that masculine wording significantly outweighs feminine wording, regardless of industry gender-typing. Experimental results show that ventures described using masculine language are evaluated more favourably, perceived to have greater long-term growth potential, and granted higher cognitive legitimacy than those described with feminine language. These effects hold irrespective of the entrepreneur’s gender. Together, our findings reveal a linguistic mechanism through which gender inequality is reproduced in entrepreneurship and highlight how seemingly neutral texts can systematically advantage ventures aligned with masculine norms.