Gender Inequality in Pitching an Idea? How Intuitive and Analytical Thinking Styles Influence Willingness to Invest

For those starting a venture based on an idea, the acquisition of resources such as financing plays a key role. The literature suggests that female founders receive fewer financing sources for their ideas than their male counterparts, indicating that men’s ideas tend to be preferred. By contrast, investigations of the crowdfunding environment find that women are more likely to be funded because they are perceived as more trustworthy than men. However, in a recent field experiment no preferences have been found among equity investors as to firm founder gender. Overall, in uncertain situations like funding an idea, past research proposes that having limited access to information when making decisions means that individuals are more likely to rely on stereotyping. Similarly, intuition impacts behavior under uncertainty, which could lead to judgment errors. However, the intuitive and analytical thinking styles have not hitherto been considered as a means of explaining gender differences in access to financing. To further enrich the literature, we explore whether women’s limited access to funding depends on potential investors’ decision-making styles. In two randomized web-based experiments (N=2,021 participants), we explore entrepreneurs’, investors’, and non-entrepreneurs’ attributions to intuitive and analytical thinking styles to assess their possible impact on access to financing for male-, female-, and mix-presented entrepreneurial ideas and respond to the following research question: How do intuitive and analytical thinking styles influence the willingness to invest in a male- versus female-presented idea?