Entrepreneurs are often told to project rationality through emotional neutrality: stay composed, keep a steady voice, and avoid showing too much emotion. In many high-stakes settings, that advice sounds sensible. A calm, neutral demeanor can signal rationality, discipline, and professionalism. But in crowdfunding, where backers often respond not only to ideas but also to human connection, that same neutrality may send the wrong message. Our study asks a simple but important question: when entrepreneurs appear emotionally neutral in crowdfunding videos, does that help them look competent, or does it reduce their chances of getting funded?

Test how faces and voices shape backers’ decisions

To answer this question, we analyzed 548 Kickstarter pitch videos drawn from technology, design, craft, and fashion categories. We focused on campaigns in which a single entrepreneur was visible and speaking in their own voice, allowing us to examine emotional neutrality in both facial expression and vocal tone. Using pre-trained machine-learning tools, we measured how neutral each entrepreneur’s face and voice appeared during the pitch and then linked those signals to whether the campaign ultimately reached its funding goal.

This approach let us move beyond what entrepreneurs said and examine how they delivered their message. That matters because crowdfunding backers are not traditional venture capitalists. They often make decisions with limited information and may rely more heavily on emotional and interpersonal cues when deciding whom to support. In such a context, neutrality may not be interpreted as professionalism. It may instead come across as distance, coldness, or a lack of engagement.

See how the same neutral signal is judged differently

Our findings show that emotional neutrality is not evaluated equally. A neutral facial expression—a “poker face”—is penalized for women, but not for men. For women entrepreneurs, a one-standard-deviation increase in facial neutrality was associated with a 22.7% decrease in the probability of campaign success. For men, the equivalent facial neutrality had no statistically meaningful effect. In other words, the same composed expression does not travel the same way across gendered expectations.

The story is different, but equally revealing, for vocal delivery. A neutral vocal tone lowered crowdfunding success for both women and men. Yet this penalty was not evenly distributed across contexts. It was concentrated in male-typed categories such as technology and design, while it largely disappeared in female-typed categories such as fashion and craft. This suggests that vocal expressiveness may be especially important when backers are evaluating more uncertain or technically complex projects and rely on voice as a cue for clarity, conviction, and engagement.

Recognize that crowdfunding rewards connection, not just composure

These findings matter because they challenge a common assumption in entrepreneurial communication that emotional restraint is universally beneficial. In traditional finance settings, neutrality may align with expectations of rigor and control. In crowdfunding, however, audiences appear to interpret neutral cues through the combined lens of gender norms and pitch context. That means the “rationality signal” of neutrality does not operate uniformly across settings.

Our results also offer a more nuanced explanation for why women sometimes appear to fare well in crowdfunding. The answer may not be that bias disappears on crowdfunding platforms. Rather, it may be that the crowd tends to reward communication styles associated with emotional expressiveness and penalize women when they depart from those expectations. That is a more uncomfortable but more realistic conclusion.

Change how pitches are designed, coached, and evaluated

The practical takeaway is not that entrepreneurs should “perform emotion” in some artificial way. It is that pitch delivery should be matched to audience expectations and category context.

For entrepreneurs, especially those pitching in crowdfunding environments, seeming too emotionally flat may be costly.

For coaches, incubators, and accelerators, the lesson is to stop offering one-size-fits-all advice about pitch professionalism. “Stay neutral” may be useful in one funding arena and harmful in another.

For platforms and evaluators, the findings are a reminder that judgments of competence and credibility are not purely objective; they are filtered through social expectations that can reproduce bias.

Read the full paper to rethink what investors really reward

This paper will be especially valuable for scholars of entrepreneurial finance, gender, and nonverbal communication, as well as for practitioners who train founders or design pitch processes. It shows that emotional expression is not just background noise in entrepreneurial evaluation. It is part of the signal itself, and that signal is interpreted differently depending on who is delivering it, how it is delivered, and where the pitch takes place. If we want fairer and more effective entrepreneurial evaluation, we need to pay closer attention not only to what founders say, but also to the emotional rules audiences bring with them when they listen.

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Author bios

Jennie Jiongni Mao is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of St. Gallen whose research examines how entrepreneurial and innovation systems reproduce inequality. She studies how social structures and evaluative processes shape recognition, opportunity, and resource allocation for underrepresented actors. Her research employs computational and quantitative methods, combining machine learning applied to text, image, and video data with experimental and quasi-experimental designs.

Charles (Charlie) Williams is Associate Professor of Management and Technology at Bocconi University. His research focuses on how people, structure, and experience affect the evolution of firms, with studies that examine how firms adapt their knowledge while expanding abroad, how entrepreneurial firms face the challenges of growth, and how market frictions shape the rewards to different business positions.

Silvia Stroe is an assistant professor of entrepreneurship and innovation in the School of Management at the University of St. Gallen. Her research examines the microfoundations of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial finance, focusing on the role of affective, cognitive, and non-conscious processes in human behavior across entrepreneurial contexts, using psychophysiological methods to capture their real-time manifestation.

Charlotta Sirén is an associate professor of management with a special focus on entrepreneurship and innovation at the University of St.Gallen. Her research examines sustainability-oriented and socially impactful entrepreneurship, using innovative methodological approaches to advance theory and empirical insight.