Gender and social entrepreneurship fundraising: A mission drift perspective
研究发现女性社会创业者在早期混合型社会企业融资中比男性更有优势，因为她们被认为更少可能发生使命漂移（即牺牲社会目标追求利润），从而缓解了投资者的担忧。
• 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.