Empowering female entrepreneurs through university affiliation: evidence from Italian academic spinoffs

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.