“Sometimes your gender can hinder you from showing your ability because a prospect doesn’t believe you are capable,” president and co-founder of Artech Information Systems, Ranjini Poddar, said in a 2011 article in Entrepreneur.
Many women in the entrepreneurial world feel the exact same way. A 2018 poll conducted by Fast Company, a popular business magazine, found that more than half of female business owners said they “encountered some form of bias.”
The same poll also found that 60 percent of women claim that either bankers or investors discriminated against them in one form or another, simply because of their gender.
While the majority of female entrepreneurs believe they are discriminated against when it comes to starting a business and other ventures, a new study suggests otherwise.
The study, published in January 2019, looked at the role of gender in certain business ventures, finding that there were no clear forms of discrimination when it comes to pitching startups to “venture capitalists and business angels.”
In order to test their hypothesis, Will Gornall and Ilya A. Strebulaev sent out over 80,000 emails by both men and women to interested parties, pitching ideas for potential investment. According to their findings, they observed results “not consistent with discrimination against females … at the initial contact stage of investment.” They were unable to find discrimination in later stages of investment either.
But this isn’t the only interesting data the study found about gender discrimination. In addition to the lack of clear discrimination in the workplace, Gornall and Strebulaev found that women actually have an advantage over men when pitching identical projects.
According to the study, “Female entrepreneurs received an 8% higher rate of interested replies than men pitching identical projects,” despite the lack of female-founded startups in the business world. According to the Small Business Administration in 2016, only 36 percent of all businesses in the United States are owned and operated by women.
So if women have a clear, significant advantage when it comes to receiving investments, why aren’t more of them entrepreneurs? The authors of the study don’t have that answer. Instead, they simply stated that “a number of mechanisms” could explain why women don’t want to invest their time in startups.
But whatever their reasons, it appears women don’t become entrepreneurs because they don’t want to, not because sexism is preventing them.
