Does Digitalization Sufficiently Empower Female Entrepreneurs? Evidence from Their Online Gender Identities and Crowdfunding Performance

Drawing upon cyberfeminist theory with a socially constructed view of gender, this paper aims to objectively reveal the extent of digitalization in female entrepreneurs’ empowerment by examining the impacts of their online gender identities on crowdfunding performance. Leveraging a female-led sample of 3125 Kickstarter crowdfunding campaigns, we develop a measure of gender identity online using natural language processing analytic techniques to mine linguistic narratives, and empirically investigate our questions. The results reveal an inverted U-shaped relationship between the online displays of masculinity and crowdfunding performance for female entrepreneurs and no significant effect of femininity on crowdfunding performance. Regarding hybrid masculinity and femininity, we find those female entrepreneurs who display a masculine identity (i.e., high on masculinity and low on femininity) online perform better in crowdfunding. The results clearly demonstrate that the potential of crowdfunding for female entrepreneurs’ empowerment is overestimated in that embracing masculinity is reproduced online in addressing women’s financial constraints, thus providing objective and reliable evidence for informing the debate on the extent of digitalization in female entrepreneurs’ empowerment. Does digitalization sufficiently empower female entrepreneurs? Evidence from examining the impacts of their online gender identities on crowdfunding performance. Drawing upon cyberfeminist theory with a socially constructed view of gender, this paper relies on a dataset of female entrepreneurs online in a crowdfunding domain to reexamine the extent of digitalization in their empowerment. Through an empirical investigation of how female entrepreneurs “doing” gender identity online affects crowdfunding performance, this study shows that the online displays of masculinity have an inverted U-shaped association with crowdfunding performance; femininity has no significant effect; and their hybrids—a masculine identity (i.e., high on masculinity and low on femininity)—are more advantageous than are feminine, androgynous, and undifferentiated identities. Our findings based on cyberfeminist theoretical analyses reveal that embracing masculinity is reproduced online in addressing women’s financial constraints, strongly demonstrating that the true potential of crowdfunding for female entrepreneurs’ empowerment is overestimated. This paper provides objective evidence for informing the debates on the digitalization potential for female entrepreneurs’ empowerment and sheds light on how to apply cyberfeminism in subsequent research. Female entrepreneurs can also use our findings to improve crowdfunding performance.