Falling On Deaf Ears? Audience Reactions to the Entrepreneurial Failure Narratives Told by Women Versus Men

• In Event: 40860 - Section on Economic Sociology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 9. Wealth and stratification

Abstract

Entrepreneurial failure narratives play a crucial role in shaping public perceptions, emotional processing, and potential future entrepreneurial engagement. While existing research has extensively examined founding narratives, failure narratives remain underexplored, particularly in how audience responses differ based on the gender of the entrepreneur. This study examines whether entrepreneurial failure narratives told by women receive different audience reactions compared to those told by men and explores how narrative characteristics influence engagement. Using a mixed-methods approach, we analyze a dataset of entrepreneurial failure narratives from Medium.com. We employ sentiment analysis using the Twitter-RoBERTa-base model and a combination of computational and manual content analyses, including Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of LIWC word-level data and Factor Analysis of Mixed Data (FAMD) on qualitative narrative constructs. Additionally, we assess whether authors continue in entrepreneurship post-failure narrative publication using LinkedIn data. Our findings indicate significant gendered differences in audience engagement. Women-authored failure narratives are more likely to receive comments but are associated with lower continued entrepreneurial participation. Further, we identify key narrative features that mediate audience reactions: emotionality, failure attribution, narrative structure, and communality. Interaction effects reveal that women employing analytical narrative structures gain higher engagement, whereas communal framing and internal failure attribution negatively impact audience reception. These results suggest that women entrepreneurs engage in both "story-taking," conforming to dominant entrepreneurial narratives to gain legitimacy, and "story-giving," strategically crafting narratives to resonate with audiences. Additionally, post-2019 shifts in gender representation in failure narratives suggest evolving cultural norms around entrepreneurship. This study contributes to research on gender and entrepreneurship, cultural cognition, and computational social science, providing new insights into how narratives shape entrepreneurial legitimacy and engagement in digital discourse.

Authors

• Jessica J. Santana, University of California-Santa Barbara

• Jennifer Jennings, University of Alberta

• Dev Jennings, University of Alberta