Female entrepreneurship, despite increasing attention, is still largely understudied, especially in the academic context. By adopting the lenses of entrepreneurial ecosystems and feminist theories, the paper investigates the firm performance of female entrepreneurs. We provide empirical evidence of the underperformance of women-led firms, being academic spinoffs or not, compared to men-led firms in terms of growth and their overperformance in terms of survival rate. In addition, we focus on differences in the performance of women-led firms only by comparing Italian academic and nonacademic companies. In virtue of their university affiliation, women-led academic spinoffs result to grow more than women-led nonacademic spinoffs and tend to show lower survival rates, which makes them more similar to men-led companies.

尽管女性企业家精神受到越来越多的关注，但在很大程度上仍未得到充分研究，尤其是在学术背景下。通过采用创业生态系统和女权主义理论的视角，本文调查了女性企业家的企业绩效。我们提供了与男性领导的公司相比，女性领导的公司在增长方面表现不佳的实证证据，以及在生存率方面的超常表现。此外，我们仅通过比较意大利学术和非学术公司来关注女性领导的公司的绩效差异。凭借她们的大学隶属关系，女性领导的学术衍生公司比女性领导的非学术衍生公司增长更快，而且存活率往往较低，这使得它们与男性领导的公司更相似。