We examine differences in perseverance between male- and female-led entrepreneurial ventures during resource seeking through grant applications. Exploiting a gender-neutral evaluation setting provided by a premier innovation grant program in China where funding allocation is merit-based and measured by the ranking of firm’s evaluation scores, we find that male-led ventures are significantly more likely to reapply following an initial grant rejection, relative to female-led ventures with comparable attributes. We further examine how female-led ventures respond differently than male-led ventures to noisy evaluative feedback. Notably, male-led ventures tend to be more motivated to reapply by divergent evaluations compared to female-led ventures. Specifically, male-led ventures are influenced more by positive signals while female-led ventures by the aggregate evaluation. We propose a signal interpretation mechanism to explain the observed gender differences in perseverance.
