Addressing the gendered odds of new venture founding and funding

Despite the fact that female entrepreneurship has been increasing over the past few decades, a gender gap in entrepreneurship still exists. This is true both for the number of ventures founded by female entrepreneurs and the amount of funding attracted by them. This gender gap presents untapped economic and societal potential. In particular, research has shown that female inventors and entrepreneurs are crucial to new product developments in areas like (but not limited to) women’s health, speech language care, and online mental health services. Such innovations are deemed to have a significant impact on economic growth, prosperity, and societal inclusivity.

Due to increased awareness of the gender gap in entrepreneurship, the number of training programs aimed at fostering (female) entrepreneurship has increased dramatically over the last two decades. However, evidence on the effectiveness of these programs is mixed, both when looking at scientific evaluations of these interventions and when assessing actual change in female growth entrepreneurship. Hence, there is an urgent need to better understand which mechanisms and policy measures can effectively facilitate ambitious female entrepreneurs to make it through the funding funnel and enhance their ability to grow their businesses during their entrepreneurial careers.

This project tackles this crucial societal challenge by developing a novel theoretical framework, and by designing and testing state-of-the-art two-sided interventions. The project will include several (field) experiments in collaboration with Dutch partners to focus on interventions in the Netherlands.

This project will be supervised by Prof. Pursey Heugens and Dr. Laura Rosendahl Huber.

Entrepreneurship, Gender Gap, New Venture Funding, Inequality, Experiments, Targeted Interventions, Societal Impact

This project leverages the fact that researchers have identified two types of factors that hamper the growth ambitions of female entrepreneurs. First, on the supply-side, elements like personal preferences in terms of growth ambitions, industry choice based on social impact rather than economic growth potential, and styles of communicating about start-up characteristics have been shown to influence venture size and growth rates among female entrepreneurs (Huang et al., 2021). Second, demand-side factors, such as investor traits, preferences for a masculine entrepreneurial stereotype, and male-dominated investor networks have been found to create significant barriers for female entrepreneurs to acquire the necessary resources for venture growth (Abraham, 2020; Kanze et al., 2020). Crucially, however, these two factors have often been studied in isolation, leaving the interplay between them underexplored and ill understood.

Yet the fact that women face significant barriers in their resource acquisition is likely to influence their ambitions and willingness to grow their business. Vice versa, women’s lower (arguably more realistic) ambitions do not match the traditional masculine view that most investors have of successful ventures, making them less likely to invest in female-led ventures (Chen, 2020; Eddleston et al., 2016). As a result, many of the interventions that have been proposed (and implemented) up to now may have yielded disappointing results, because they are either oriented towards enhancing the repertoire of female entrepreneurs or towards challenging the evaluative criteria used by investors, but never at addressing both issues simultaneously. A complicating factor is that most interventions rely on the oversimplified assumption that male- and female-led ventures are identical except for the gender of the person at the helm, which further reduces the effectiveness of the proposed interventions.

This project thus starts from the premise that we need to understand, from a holistic theoretical perspective, how female-led ventures are different from male-led ventures. We first need to advance a dedicated theory of the female-led venture. Only then can we begin to ideate new interventions that work with greater accuracy and that acknowledge and address the interplay between supply-side and demand-side factors. Moreover, we need to acknowledge, more so than has been done in the literature thus far, that intervening in complex social systems is not without risk. When women engage more in entrepreneurship, attractive macro-level outcomes like economic growth and a more equitable distribution of economic opportunities may obtain, but at the micro level women may also come to face negative personal consequences like deteriorating mental and physical health, and strain on social and familial relationships. Only when these risks are appropriately mapped and understood can our attention shift towards developing two-sided interventions aimed at addressing the gendered odds of entrepreneurial founding and funding, and implementing them at scale involving a broad coalition of societal partners.

The project has two main scientific aims: (1) to develop a dedicated theory of the female-led venture by conducting an integrative review of the female entrepreneurship literature and reinterpreting its prior findings within a theory-of-the-firm framework, and (2) to develop and test state-of-the-art two-sided interventions incorporating these novel theoretical insights. Additionally, there is room for a project of choice within the topic of female entrepreneurship to be developed by the PhD student in collaboration with their supervisory team.

GMAT or GRE are preferred (if these are unavailable an additional assignment will be required)

Outstanding GPA

Research Master is a plus

Required by ERIM

All application documents required by ERIM can be found here.

Start date of February 1, 2025 is preferred, but a later starting date is possible.

The project is expected to lead to top publications in the domain of management and entrepreneurship. In addition, we will bring together a group of influential scholars in the field of (female) entrepreneurship through the organization of symposia or professional development workshops. Finally, we will host regular networking events to disseminate our research findings and to build a community of collaboration partners.

This project will involve collaborations with external partners as implementation- and dissemination partners to design and conduct the field experiments. In addition, it will benefit from strong connections with other renowned scholars at various business schools in Europe and the US (e.g., Bocconi, Copenhagen Business School, and University of Michigan).

For the societal impact of this project, we have initiated a collaboration with Code V, an initiative of more than 40 financial service providers that was launched in December 2023, that aims to close the gender gap in financing in the Netherlands. Next to obtaining a pre-commitment by this consortium as a whole, several individual participants of this initiative have furthermore confirmed their intention to collaborate on the implementation and dissemination of our research project. Ensuring this pre-commitment is vital to the feasibility of this project, given the two-sided nature of the proposed interventions. In return for their support, we have committed to giving a lecture at each of the partner organizations at least once during the project period. Furthermore, we will host regular networking events to disseminate our research findings and to build a community of collaboration partners. Based on the wide media coverage of the launch of the Code V initiative, we believe that this collaboration will also yield significant media attention enabling the further dissemination of the knowledge obtained through the studies in this project.

First, even though the topic of female entrepreneurship has been well-established, much of the research in this field has been developed through a theoretical lens based on male-led ventures and has not adapted these theories to incorporate the perspectives and experiences of women. Therefore, we in this project we will first create a new theoretical foundation, fostering a holistic understanding of the female-led venture.

Second, we will apply a stepwise procedure to design a state-of-the-art proof-of-concept intervention to help ambitious female entrepreneurs successfully navigate the funding funnel. In order to do so, we will collect both qualitative data and conduct several pilot experiments to gain an understanding of the effectiveness of different intervention elements. With the insights gathered from these pilots, we will be able to set up a small-scale intensive RCT to test our newly developed intervention.

Abraham, M. (2020). Gender-role Incongruity and Audience-based Gender Bias: An Examination of Networking among Entrepreneurs. Administrative Science Quarterly, 65(1), 151–180.

Bechthold, L. A., & Huber, L. R. (2018). Yes, I can! – A field experiment on female role model effects in entrepreneurship. In Academy of Management Proceedings, 2018(1), 12081.

Berrone, P., Duran, P., Gómez-Mejía, L., Heugens, P. P. M. A. R., Kostova, T., & van Essen, M. (2022). Impact of informal institutions on the prevalence, strategy, and performance of family firms: A meta-analysis. Journal of International Business Studies, 53(6), 1153–1177

Brush, C., Edelman, L. F., Manolova, T., & Welter, F. (2019). A gendered look at entrepreneurship ecosystems. Small Business Economics, 53(2), 393–408.

Chen, C. (2020). Can Business Accelerators Level the Playing Field For Female Entrepreneurs? A Two-Sided Matching Approach Suggests Yes (SSRN Scholarly Paper 3277691).

Eddleston, K. A., Ladge, J. J., Mitteness, C., & Balachandra, L. (2016). Do you See what I See? Signaling Effects of Gender and Firm Characteristics on Financing Entrepreneurial Ventures. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 40(3), 489–514.

Guzman, J., & Kacperczyk, A. (Olenka). (2019). Gender gap in entrepreneurship. Research Policy, 48(7), 1666–1680.

Huang, L., Joshi, P., Wakslak, C., & Wu, A. (2021). Sizing Up Entrepreneurial Potential: Gender Differences in Communication and Investor Perceptions of Long-Term Growth and Scalability. Academy of Management Journal, 64(3), 716–740.

Huber, L. R., Sloof, R., & Van Praag, M. (2014). The effect of early entrepreneurship education: Evidence from a field experiment. European Economic Review, 72, 76-97.

Kanze, D., Conley, M. A., Okimoto, T. G., Phillips, D. J., & Merluzzi, J. (2020). Evidence that investors penalize female founders for lack of industry fit. Science Advances, 6(48).

Koning, R., Samila, S., & Ferguson, J.-P. (2021). Who do we invent for? Patents by women focus more on women’s health, but few women get to invent. Science, 372(6548), 1345–1348.

Kroezen, J. J., & Heugens, P. P. M. A. R. (2019). What Is Dead May Never Die: Institutional Regeneration through Logic Reemergence in Dutch Beer Brewing. Administrative Science Quarterly, 64(4), 976–1019.

Rocha, V., & van Praag, M. (2020). Mind the gap: The role of gender in entrepreneurial career choice and social influence by founders. Strategic Management Journal, 41(5), 841–866.

Smolka, K. M., Verheul, I., Burmeister–Lamp, K., & Heugens, P. P. (2018). Get it together! Synergistic effects of causal and effectual decision–making logics on venture performance. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 42(4), 571-604.

Snellman, K., & Solal, I. (2023). Does Investor Gender Matter for the Success of Female Entrepreneurs? Gender Homophily and the Stigma of Incompetence in Entrepreneurial Finance. Organization Science, 34(2), 680–699.

ERIM offers fully-funded and salaried PhD positions, which means that accepted PhD candidates become employees (promovendi) of Erasmus University Rotterdam. Salary and benefits are in accordance with the Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities (CAO).

Erasmus University Rotterdam aspires to be an equitable and inclusive community. We nurture an open culture, where everyone is supported to fulfil their full potential. We see inclusivity of talent as the basis of our successes, and the diversity of perspectives and people as a highly valued outcome. EUR provides equal opportunities to all employees and applicants regardless of gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, age, neurodiversity, functional impairment, citizenship, or any other aspect which makes them unique. We look forward to welcoming you to our community.

For questions regarding the PhD application and selection procedure, please check the Admissions or send us an e-mail via phdadmissions@erim.eur.nl.