Perceptions of women and men as entrepreneurs: evidence for differential effects of attributional augmenting.

It was hypothesized that perceptions of women who become entrepreneurs are enhanced by attributional augmenting because they adopt this role despite major obstacles to doing so. In contrast, attributional augmenting was expected to operate to a lesser degree for men who become entrepreneurs because they presumably face weaker obstacles. Three studies offered support for these hypotheses; all of these investigations used between-subjects designs in which women and men shown in standard-format photos were described to different groups of raters as being either entrepreneurs or managers. As predicted, raters assigned significantly higher scores to women, but not to men, when they were described as entrepreneurs.