Drawing upon cyberfeminist theory with a socially constructed view of gender, this paper aims to objectively reveal the extent of digitalization in female entrepreneurs’ empowerment by examining the impacts of their online gender identities on crowdfunding performance. Leveraging a female-led sample of 3125 Kickstarter crowdfunding campaigns, we develop a measure of gender identity online using natural language processing analytic techniques to mine linguistic narratives, and empirically investigate our questions. The results reveal an inverted U-shaped relationship between the online displays of masculinity and crowdfunding performance for female entrepreneurs and no significant effect of femininity on crowdfunding performance. Regarding hybrid masculinity and femininity, we find those female entrepreneurs who display a masculine identity (i.e., high on masculinity and low on femininity) online perform better in crowdfunding. The results clearly demonstrate that the potential of crowdfunding for female entrepreneurs’ empowerment is overestimated in that embracing masculinity is reproduced online in addressing women’s financial constraints, thus providing objective and reliable evidence for informing the debate on the extent of digitalization in female entrepreneurs’ empowerment.

本文借鉴网络女性主义理论和社会建构的性别观，旨在通过研究女性企业家的在线性别身份对众筹绩效的影响，客观地揭示数字化在女性企业家赋权方面的程度。利用女性主导的 3125 次 Kickstarter 众筹活动样本，我们使用自然语言处理分析技术开发了一种在线性别认同测量方法，以挖掘语言叙述，并对我们的问题进行实证调查。结果显示，女性企业家的男性气质在线展示与众筹绩效之间存在倒U型关系，女性气质对众筹绩效没有显着影响。关于混合男性气质和女性气质，我们发现那些表现出男性身份的女性企业家（即，男性气质高，女性气质低）在线在众筹中表现更好。结果清楚地表明，众筹对女性企业家赋权的潜力被高估了，因为在解决女性财务限制方面，在线复制了拥抱男性气质，从而为关于女性企业家赋权数字化程度的辩论提供了客观和可靠的证据。