Jiongni MAO

I am a fifth-year Ph.D. student at Bocconi University, interested in computational psychometrics and women in entrepreneurship. Originally from a marketing background, I deliberately shifted to entrepreneurship research during my first year of Ph.D. studies, driven by my passion for the decision-making process of entrepreneurs and resource providers. This transition has allowed me to delve deeper into the field and leverage my expertise in both marketing and strategy research.

In my research, I employ automatic computational methods to analyze various forms of unstructured data, including texts, images, and videos from online platforms. I have reviewed and compared the automatic coding tools used in current social science research to shed light on the complexities in capturing and interpreting nonverbal emotions in entrepreneurial pitches. Applying these tools to decode nonverbal communication of entrepreneurs who seek funding from the accelerator program and crowdfunding platform, I found the way men and women nonverbally communicate their emotions is different, and the persuasive power of the same nonverbal communication method also differs for the two gender groups. As such, I realized entrepreneurship has historically been a male-dominant sector, continuing to exhibit a pronounced disparity between the two genders.

Essays in my dissertation center theoretically on gender and entrepreneurship, investigating how the strategy to restraint nonverbal emotions during the pitch brings about different crowdfunding outcome for male and female entrepreneurs, and how the attention to a female-centric fraud event may change the representation of women in investment activities and the same-gender support they provide for female entrepreneurs.