ABSTRACT
The National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) suggests that impact of angel financing from groups and individuals overall is approximately $100 billion in United States. This chapter discusses women's ability to obtain critical early-stage, angel funding. It uses concept of "readiness for funding" to explore the level of readiness of women entrepreneurs to obtain early-stage investments. Readiness is a concept that has been explored in several different literatures, including organizational behavior, strategic management, and management of technology. Drawing from role congruity and gender stereotype schema theory, chapter argues that impressions of readiness may be influenced by widely shared beliefs about characteristics attributed to men and women and appropriateness of their behavior in investment setting. Gender stereotype schema theory argues that there are gender-based networks of information that allow for some types of information to be more easily integrated than others and that these strong sex-based networks make it easier to absorb information that is stereotype congruent, which further solidifies gender stereotypes.
