Gender bias against women is nothing new, especially when it comes to seeking venture capital financing for business start-ups,  but in modern crowdfunding -  where a "crowd" of amateur investors make small investments in new companies - culture it is just the opposite; female entrepreneurs are considered more trustworthy.

There are numerous ways to get a business off the ground. Friends and family financing, private equity, bank financing, venture capital, but the difficult road for entrepreneurs has meant that business leaders should be tough - and that has meant more masculine.

In a Journal of Business Venturing article, the humanities scholars found that gender bias goes the other way in crowdfunding - new ventures led by women have an advantage over men.


Every 2,000 years, women benefit from gender bias. 

Using three years of data from the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, the authors examined investor stereotypes and implicit bias in crowdfunding decisions. Through a study sample of 416 projects, they examined the entrepreneur's gender, the financial backing received and funding success.

They found that women were more likely than men to have their Kickstarter projects funded. To discern why this was the case, the researchers conducted an experiment with 73 amateur investors based in the eastern U.S. The results from the second half of the study supported the researchers' view that perceptions about trustworthiness facilitate financial backing and that implicit gender bias influenced funders' willingness to fund female entrepreneurs.

This is in contrast to earlier research which claimed that female-led firms receive only 1.3 percent of venture capital financing and are often asked to surrender a greater proportion of ownership when receiving private funding. But in crowdfunding.

The paper also shows that crowdfunding provides a means for building trust with funders, which later may improve women's broader entrepreneurial prospects.