Gender Diversity and Entrepreneurship

摘要

Crowdfunding has become an important source of capital for entrepreneurship, and it may further challenge the mediate role of traditional financial system. We document the crowdfunding activities initiated by Chinese entrepreneurs on the "colorful investment" platform (from the platform beginning to 2019) and analyze the influence of entrepreneur team gender diversity on crowdfunding performance. The results show that teams with higher gender diversity will set lower campaign goal amounts and receive lower actual financing. We believe that the most likely explanation for these differences is that women’s risk aversion preference. Suggesting a tendency to take less risk activities, we find that entrepreneur team with higher gender diversity (more women) tend to set lower goal amounts and are more likely to achieve higher pledged amounts relative to campaign goals.