Venture failure plays a crucial role in entrepreneurship, affecting both entrepreneurs with a history of failure and crowd funders with failure experiences like investment loss. By drawing on stereotype activation theory, our multimethod experimental study examines how the two perspectives of prior failures affect the crowdfunding success of female entrepreneurs. Our findings show a reversal effect: After an investment failure, crowd funders apply stereotypes against women, hindering female (social) entrepreneurs’ future crowdfunding success. Conversely, prior entrepreneurial failures affect funding allocation irrespective of gender, indicating that gender stereotypes do not hinder the crowdfunding success of female (social) entrepreneurs in this case.
