This study explores success rates in obtaining angel financing based on the gender composition of entrepreneurial teams using data from the television program Shark Tank.Consistent with prior work, we find that women-owned teams receive lower company valuations and less capital to finance their new ventures relative to their male counterparts. However, we find that the likelihood of a team receiving an offer from an angel investor is independent of the entrepreneurs' gender. We discover women-owned firms initially value their companies at significantly lower amounts than teams consisting of all males. Thus, angel investors provide lower final company valuations to women-owned firms because women, on average, ask for less.These results hold when controlling for important entrepreneur and firm characteristics that may strongly impact the angel financing outcome, such as the size of the entrepreneurial team, company age and prior success of the firm. We also find that the negative effect of a womenowned firm on the amount of financing received is highly dependent upon the industry the entrepreneurs choose to enter.
JEL Classification: J15, L26, M13
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.