Melissa Cardon
University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Abstract:
Entrepreneurship is still a man’s world. Despite the dramatic increase in the number of female founders, the likelihood of becoming an entrepreneur continues to be much lower for women than for men across different cultures and nationalities, and is widely associated with masculine agentic traits such as autonomy, risk-taking, and innovativeness, while the female gender is habitually described using communal traits such as interdependent, warm, and modest. This mismatch between role and gender stereotypes can lead to lower interest in engaging in entrepreneurship among women. An important potential mechanism contributing to entrepreneurship as a gendered field is the fact that women are underrepresented not only as entrepreneurs, but also as employees of firms that may be their best stepping stones to becoming entrepreneurs themselves. It is therefore crucial to study factors that encourage or impede female employment in start-up firms.
Using insights from signaling theory, stereotype activation theory, and field-specific ability beliefs theory, we build and test a model to examine how objective gender data, entrepreneurial/gendered wording, and implicit messages concerning fixed versus learnable abilities in job advertisements impact job-seekers of different genders. Data were collected from an online job posting and job-seeker matching app in which start-up firms posted job advertisements, and individuals reviewed and evaluated those advertisements. Data were collected from a period of 3 years and encompass 394 organizations that posted 2,603 job advertisements, which were rated by 8,950 potential applicants for a total of 675,785 independent job-rating sessions. Results indicating how different type of signals in job advertisements impact job-seekers’ evaluation of organizational attractiveness will be presented.

Dr. Melissa Cardon is the Nestlé Professor of Management at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Melissa conducts research on unleashing human potential within entrepreneurial firms, including a dual interest in HR practices that maximize employee potential, and the emotional, relational, and cognitive aspects of entrepreneurs that contribute to optimizing their behavior and performance. Melissa’s recent research has focused on entrepreneurial passion at the individual and team levels of analysis. Her work has been published in journals such as Academy of Management Review, Journal of Business Venturing, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, Journal of Management Studies, and Journal of Management. She is a Field Editor for the Journal of Business Venturing and on the Editorial Boards of Entrepreneurship: Theory and Practice, Journal of Management Studies, and Human Resource Management Review.

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Venue
Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering
Building B26/B – Room 0.1 – ground floor
Via Lambruschini 4/B, Milano