Double standards in roadshows: the impact of investors’ dynamic gender-based bias on the financing performance of women entrepreneurs
通过三个实验，研究路演中投资者对女性创业者的隐性偏见和双重标准如何影响融资绩效，发现女性处于融资劣势，且投资者过往投资经历会调节这种效应。
Purpose Accelerators and roadshows provide valuable scenarios for studying the embeddedness and dynamic effect of gender. Drawing on status theory and signaling theory, the study explores how investors’ implicit bias and the cohort effects in roadshows affect financing performance regarding investor drivers. Design/methodology/approach Experiment 1 recruited 220 financial practitioners in China and asked them to make investment judgments on two actual pitching materials of women- and men-led startups in the Internet health industry after manipulating past funding scenarios. Experiment 2 considers project-specific features to invite 211 Chinese financial practitioners to read the roadshow materials of women- or men-led startups in the Internet health or children’s education industry. Experiment 3 adopts the health monitoring and clothing manufacturing industries’ roadshow materials to recruit 238 financial practitioners in the United States (US) for the study. Findings Findings show that (1) women are at a financing disadvantage in the roadshows, (2) investors’ double standards reduce women entrepreneurs’ financing performance and (3) the mediating effect of double standards is moderated by the financing performance of women or men entrepreneurs that investors have approached in past investment activities. Originality/value This study contributes to the gender gap and accelerator literature by combining status theory and signaling theory to study the dynamic and embeddedness of entrepreneur gender effects in roadshows from investor drivers. The findings inform the participation of women entrepreneurs in accelerators, the selection of potential investors, and shifting investors’ perceptions toward women entrepreneurs at the early financing stage.