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This paper studies the gender gap in accessing financial resources through crowdfunding by developing a novel\ud construct for social capital, latent network capital. We provide original empirical evidence based on 985 projects\ud hosted on Kiva, a platform reaching 3.7 million borrowers, 81 % of them women, assessing how the interplay\ud between latent network capital and the gender of a project proposer affects the amount of funds raised. To this\ud aim, we develop the notion of a latent network whereby two projects are linked if they share a funder, as they\ud both benefit from the visibility of the funder, signalling confidence in them. We capture a project's latent network\ud capital through the project's centrality within this latent network, finding that the latent network capital elas-\ud ticity of the amount of funds raised, while remaining positive, is lower for women-led projects than for male-led\ud ones extending any pre-existing projects' gender gap |
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