Although the role of empathy in entrepreneurship has been well documented, there is a lack of understanding of how empathy influences the attitude toward entrepreneurship and the willingness to be mentored. This paper aims to fill this gap by investigating how the types of empathy (cognitive vs. affective) and entrepreneurship (social vs. for-profit) influence respondents' willingness to be mentored in light of the respondents' gender, and more precisely, which types of entrepreneur could positively influence women willingness to become an entrepreneur. Drawing on the personal identification literature and the entrepreneurship literature on attitude and intention,we measured the respondent's "willingness to be mentored” through four experiments by manipulating the types of empathy and entrepreneurship: and comparing its effect between male and female respondents. Our main theoretical contributions are twofold. We first differentiate between a new construct, "willingness to be mentored," and "attitude toward entrepreneurship”. The second contribution is to posit that there is a gender difference in the willingness to be mentored based on the type of empathy displayed by the entrepreneur. Results show that female respondents prefer to be mentored by an entrepreneur who exhibits affective empathy rather than cognitive empathy and prefer, in the absolute, a social entrepreneur that displays affective empathy. This research contributes to the overall discussion about the necessity of developing social capabilities in succeeding in new ventures and extends our understanding of the importance of empathic entrepreneurs as role models and mentors to foster entrepreneurship among women.
