Girls just wanna have funds: How women digital entrepreneurs navigate anticipated and experienced gender bias

In this article, we examine the experiences of women digital entrepreneurs in navigating anticipated and experienced bias in venture capital and digital entrepreneurship ecosystems. Where prior research has focused primarily on evaluator-side bias and structural barriers, we develop the construct of anticipated bias as a socially produced cognitive filter, demonstrating how expectations of bias circulated through media, peer narratives, and academic discourse shape women’s interpretations of interactions with investors and ecosystem actors. Anticipated and experienced bias interact recursively, forming a cyclical process that validates expectations and informs entrepreneurial behaviours. By theorising this recursive loop, we apply stigma consciousness theory to women digital entrepreneurship and suggest lower venture capital uptake is a strategic response to constraint rather than an ambition deficit. Providing empirically grounded accounts from women-founded startups, we counter celebratory narratives portraying digitalisation as a levelling force. Instead, we show how male-centred prototype and routinised practices of othering produce layered role incongruity, positioning women as outsiders.