Gender bias in lending-based crowdfunding: the case of technology development projects

The purpose of the paper is to investigate whether lending crowdfunding offers equal opportunities for female and male entrepreneurs in the context of a technology demonstration project. The analysis recognises the potential role of signalling, i.e. suggesting that any success in attracting funding may not only be contingent on gender per se, but also on how signals from women and men concerning the various project attributes will be interpreted. We design a split-sample discrete choice experiment that, apart from financial factors, consider two quality signals: private co-funding and downstream actor collaboration. Data are collected through a survey of over 2000 Swedish individuals and analysed using mixed logit models. Overall, the results indicate little gender bias against women in the case of a (characteristically) male-dominated technological development project. We find very limited evidence suggesting that any of the two project quality signals are perceived differently based on the project owner’s gender. Still, the results show that male lenders place a larger premium on actor collaboration when the project owner is female. On the whole, our findings indicate that lending crowdfunding could potentially help democratize the access to capital and reduce any existing funding obstacles for women.