The Role of Stereotype Threat, Anxiety, and Emotional Intelligence in Women’s Opportunity Evaluation

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Masculine stereotypes of entrepreneurship represent a threat to women. We aim to understand how such stereotype threat affects women’s opportunity evaluation through anxiety. We test our idea using a two-randomized-experiment strategy and achieve external validity using a survey of female entrepreneurs. We find that situational anxiety, as an emotional mechanism, explains why stereotype threat negatively influences opportunity evaluation among women. We further unveil emotional intelligence as a boundary condition enabling women to cope with stereotype threat during opportunity evaluation. Our studies provide new insights into an emotive view of stereotype threat in the context of women’s entrepreneurship.