Gender diversity in entrepreneurial team and Crowdfunding Performance

Complementing traditional forms of funding (e.g., banks, venture capital), crowdfunding provides entrepreneurs with another channel to obtain money directly from society. A recent report by the World Bank states that crowdfunding will generate more than $300 billion in funding transactions by 2025. Moreover, the number of crowdfunding platforms, as well as the level of funding activity they provide, has grown at rates of 200% to 500% per year, respectively.

Research on entrepreneurship often pays more attention to individual entrepreneurs, such as entrepreneurial motivation, network resources, background, personality traits and other factors which may affect the development and financing of new ventures. However, more and more scholars have found that although the myth of entrepreneurial heroes is very attractive, it is the entrepreneur team that reflects the real picture of the operation of the entrepreneur activity. The characteristics of entrepreneur teams are mainly reflected in the industry experience, educational background, network resources of team members, and other important features. However, the influence of gender diversity of team members in these analyses has not been tested. Our research attempts to explore the impact of gender diversity in entrepreneur teams on crowdfunding activities.

This research collects a near-comprehensive dataset of campaigns and founding teams from a real estate crowdfunding platform (Duocaitou) in China from 2015 to 2019, to record the effect of gender diversity in entrepreneur team on crowdfunding performance.

Tingting Zhu

A Research Fellow in Corporate Diversity