Gender, Race, and Entrepreneurship: A Randomized Field Experiment on Venture Capitalists and Angels

Gornall, Will; Strebulaev, Ilya A.

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3301982

Cited by 19 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 64 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…This response rate is higher than a correspondence study that sends pitch emails to venture capitalists but lower than studies that send emails to politicians or academics(Gornall and Strebulaev, 2020;Kalla et al, 2018; Milkman et al, 2015).…”

mentioning

confidence: 67%

Informed Choices: Gender Gaps in Career Advice

Gallen

2021

SSRN Journal

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper estimates gender differences in access to informal information regarding the labor market. We conduct a large-scale field experiment in which real college students seek information from 10,000 working professionals about various career paths, and we randomize whether a professional receives a message from a male or a female student. We focus the experimental design and analysis on two career attributes that prior research has shown to differentially affect the labor market choices of women: the extent to which a career accommodates work/life balance and has a competitive culture. When students ask broadly for information about a career, we find that female students receive substantially more information on work/life balance relative to male students. This gender difference persists when students disclose that they are concerned about work/life balance. In contrast, professionals mention workplace culture to male and female students at similar rates. After the study, female students are more dissuaded from their preferred career path than male students, and this difference is in part explained by professionals' greater emphasis on work/life balance when responding to female students. Finally, we elicit students' preferences for professionals and find that gender differences in information provision would remain if students contacted their most preferred professionals.

show abstract

mentioning

confidence: 67%

Informed Choices: Gender Gaps in Career Advice

Gallen

2021

SSRN Journal

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Between 2008 and 2020, the share of annual U.S. VC capital raised by female founders ranged between 1.7 percent and 2.7 percent, with no upward trend. 3 A growing literature, including Becker-Blease & Sohl (2007), Scott & Shu (2017), Gornall & Strebulaev (2018), and Ewens & Townsend (2019) has documented the gap in various ways, but has never directly addressed 1 The NVC is Harvard's flagship new venture competition and a key gateway to VC-backed entrepreneurship after HBS. Many successful founders, including those of 'unicorn' startups such as Rent the Runway and Oscar Health, have been participants in the NVC.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Gompers & Wang (2017) show that only 10-15 percent of VC-backed startup founders are women. A growing literature, including Becker-Blease & Sohl (2007), Scott & Shu (2017), Gornall & Strebulaev (2018), and Ewens & Townsend (2019) has documented the gap and aimed to characterize frictions that might lead to it.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…First, Ewens & Townsend (2019) use data on startups that seek funding on AngelList to find evidence that angel investors to prefer to invest in founders of their own gender. Second, Gornall & Strebulaev (2018) experimentally send pitch emails from startup founders to angel and VC investors. They find no evidence of discrimination at this contact stage.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Networking Frictions in Venture Capital, and the Gender Gap in Entrepreneurship

Howell

Nanda

2019

SSRN Journal

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We find that male participants in Harvard Business School's New Venture Competition who were randomly exposed to more VC investors on their panel were substantially more likely to start a VC-backed startup post-graduation, indicating that access to investors impacts fundraising independent of the quality of ideas. However, female participants experience no benefit from exposure to male or female VCs, which appears related to a reduced propensity to reach out to VCs to whom they were exposed. Our results therefore also demonstrate gender-based differences in the degree to which increased exposure to investors can address networking frictions in venture capital.

show abstract

“…Name embeddings have the potential to help identify biases, as name embedding-based classifiers [37] are already widely used by over 100 social scientists and economists to study discrimination and homophily [14,34,35]. For example, Gornall and Strebulaev find that Asian entrepreneurs received a 6% higher rate of interested replies than White, after sending 80,000 pitch emails introducing promising but fictitious start-ups to 28,000 venture capitalists [17]. AlShebli et.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Secret Lives of Names? Name Embeddings from Social Media

Ye¹,

Skiena²

2019

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Your name tells a lot about you: your gender, ethnicity and so on. It has been shown that name embeddings are more effective in representing names than traditional substring features. However, our previous name embedding model is trained on private email data and are not publicly accessible. In this paper, we explore learning name embeddings from public Twitter data. We argue that Twitter embeddings have two key advantages: (i) they can and will be publicly released to support research community. (ii) even with a smaller training corpus, Twitter embeddings achieve similar performances on multiple tasks comparing to email embeddings.As a test case to show the power of name embeddings, we investigate the modeling of lifespans. We find it interesting that adding name embeddings can further improve the performances of models using demographic features, which are traditionally used for lifespan modeling. Through residual analysis, we observe that finegrained groups (potentially reflecting socioeconomic status) are the latent contributing factors encoded in name embeddings. These were previously hidden to demographic models, and may help to enhance the predictive power of a wide class of research studies.

show abstract

Gender, Race, and Entrepreneurship: A Randomized Field Experiment on Venture Capitalists and Angels

Cited by 19 publications

References 64 publications

Informed Choices: Gender Gaps in Career Advice

Informed Choices: Gender Gaps in Career Advice

Networking Frictions in Venture Capital, and the Gender Gap in Entrepreneurship

The Secret Lives of Names? Name Embeddings from Social Media

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About