When a crisis hits: an examination of the impact of the global financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic on financing for women entrepreneurs

Yu, W. and Fei, J. and Peng, Grace and Bort, J. (2024) When a crisis hits: an examination of the impact of the global financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic on financing for women entrepreneurs. Journal of Business Venturing 39 (2), p. 106379. ISSN 0883-9026.

Abstract

Crises have significant implications for entrepreneurs' businesses. Female entrepreneurs are often found to suffer from crises due to their marginalized positions. Despite the increasing research at the nexus of crisis, entrepreneurship, and gender, how a crisis may influence investors' funding decisions concerning female entrepreneurs and whether different macro crises bring with them different implications remain under-explored questions. Drawing on role congruity theory and the crisis and strategic decision-making literature, this paper proposes that macro crises can shake the perceived incongruity between traditional stereotypes of the female gender role and masculine stereotypes related to the entrepreneur's role, thereby affecting financing for female entrepreneurs. We further compare two specific crises having different associated implications: the global financial crisis (GFC) and the COVID-19 pandemic. We conducted two studies, one emphasizing experimental manipulation and the second based on observational data. We found consistent evidence that investors were more likely to invest in female-founded ventures after the GFC; however, the opposite phenomenon occurred after COVID-19. Our experiment demonstrates that changed perceptions of gender role incongruity are a critical underlying mechanism driving our results. Our research has implications for both the entrepreneurship literature and role congruity theory.

Metadata

Statistics

DownloadsShow export options

Export as XMLJSONCSV

Activity Overview

6 month trend

3Downloads

6 month trend

98Hits

Additional statistics are available via IRStats2.

Archive Staff Only (login required)

Edit/View Item