Gender Bias and Venture Funding: Discussing Bias in the Entrepreneurship Classroom

Abstract

We report on the findings from an in-class experiment that represents a learning innovation which can enable classroom-based conversations about bias in the domain of entrepreneurship. More specifically, the present learning innovation explores gender bias in venture funding with regard to entrepreneurship. In an introduction to entrepreneurship class, we randomly assigned students to one of the three experimental conditions—students evaluated an executive summary for a venture either written by a woman, or a man, or one in which the gender was neutral (i.e., the control group). Students acted as if they were considering an investment and reported whether, for example, the executive summary was well written as well as how much equity they would want in the venture as a potential investor. Overall, these results provide evidence consistent with the inference that the students sampled in this study did not use gender as a decision-making heuristic when evaluating entrepreneurial opportunities. We discuss the results of our experiment and describe (a) how to replicate this activity, (b) how to discuss this in the classroom, and (c) how to adapt this activity to explore other types of bias (e.g., race, ethnicity, weight-based, etc.).

Academic Entrepreneurship Education: Does Gender Matter?

“…In the last few years, female entrepreneurship has attracted more attention as a field of research. In current research discussions, several reasons have been put forward as to why the field of entrepreneurship is dominated by men [2,6,7,8,9]. However, the findings concerning this complex issue are not particularly conclusive.…”

Creating an entrepreneurial learning environment for entrepreneurship education in HE: The educator’s perspective

“…In a similar vein, EE scholars have noted the important role of educators as possible creators of opportune conditions for effective and efficient learning in entrepreneurship (Béchard and Grégoire, 2005; Lee et al, 2018; Neck and Corbett, 2018). However, EE research has focused mainly on the subjects of education (that is, students) (Gielnik et al, 2014; Michaelis et al, 2019; Piperopoulos and Dimov, 2015), or on the content of learning (that is, programmes, courses and intervention descriptions) (Fox et al, 2018; Gibb, 2011; Laukkanen, 2000). This has left the educators without sufficient attention (Hannon, 2018; Neck and Corbett, 2018).…”