How and why accelerators enhance female entrepreneurship

Abstract

This study was driven by an initial finding that female founders' participation rate in Israeli accelerators is significantly higher (15.3 %) than their participation rate in the Israeli startup sector (7.4 %). Linking accelerators' design to the known barriers to female entrepreneurship, we examined how accelerators may enhance female entrepreneurship by addressing their specific needs. Based on a dataset (N = 779) of structured interviews with startup founders who participated in accelerator programs in Israel during 2011–2019, we present evidence that female founders seek and gain more entrepreneurial knowledge, network building, and entrepreneurial self-efficacy during their participation in accelerators than do male founders. Female founders also seek to increase their legitimacy more than do their male counterparts but did not report making more progress in this aspect. Finally, both the goal of and progress in obtaining access to capital and improving fundraising skills received lower ratings from female founders than from male founders. We further ask whether accelerators are more helpful for women because they are better adapted to the female gender or because they are generally better adapted to founders with those background conditions that often characterize women. We found that the startup's stage of development and the founder's prior entrepreneurial experience mediated most gender differences, supporting the latter possibility. We discuss the implications of our findings for accelerators and other support programs as a means of increasing women's participation rates in innovative entrepreneurship.