Poker face and steady voice: Gender and reactions to emotional neutrality in crowdfunding

While emotional neutrality (e.g., maintaining a neutral face, speaking with a calm voice) can help entrepreneurs project a sought-after image of rationality, the effectiveness of such displays is context-dependent and gendered. In the emotionally resonant world of crowdfunding, the value of neutrality is ambiguous, as it may conflict with audience expectations of expressiveness. Building on the Emotions as Social Information (EASI) model, we argue that equivalent neutral cues from men and women are evaluated differently. Using pre-trained machine-learning algorithms to extract facial and vocal features from 548 crowdfunding videos, we examine how neutrality in pitches relates to funding success. We find that a neutral facial expression (“poker face”) is penalized for women but has no discernible effect for men. In contrast, a neutral vocal tone lowers success for both sexes; however, further analysis reveals this penalty is concentrated in male-typed categories (e.g., technology, design) and largely absent in female-typed categories (e.g., fashion, craft). Our findings highlight that crowdfunding backers interpret emotional neutrality through the combined lens of gender and pitch context, which may create biases in entrepreneurial evaluation.