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Women Founders Outpace Male Counterparts In Certain Types of Kickstarter Funding
Nerval's Lobster writes Women outpace men when it comes to raising money for technology projects through crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter, according to a new study by researchers at New York University and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Jason Greenberg (NYC) and Ethan Mollick (Wharton/UPenn) chose 1,250 Kickstarter projects in five categories: games and technology, where founders were predominantly male; film, with an even gender distribution; and fashion and children's books, both populated with more female founders and backers. They analyzed additional factors such as "industry typing" (a theory in which people 'often hold conscious or unconscious biases about what gender is the archetype employee in a particular occupation or industry') and restricted the data set by geography and how much money each Kickstarter project wanted (a project aiming for less than $5,000 may attract an inordinate percentage of family and friends as funders, skewing results). After crunching the data, they found that female founders of technology projects were more likely than males to achieve their Kickstarter goals, a finding that didn't extend to the other four categories. "It appears female backers are responsible for helping female founders succeed in specific industry categories that women backers generally disfavor," they theorized, adding a little later: "The value of crowdfunding is that it enables access to a pool of potential female backers particularly inclined to support women in industry categories in which they believe women to be underrepresented."
Who cares.
...doesn't this mean that the other gender, males, are more likely than their female counterparts to reach their goals in the other 4 categories? How is this supposed to be good news for anyone?
It's not female solidarity. It's hot chicks taking men for chumps...kickstarter, no equity... requirements for supplying funding for nothing is chumpdum.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It could be that women are more cautious and risk-averse and will generally not attempt a project that has only a marginal chance of succeeding.
So the greater numbers of participating men make up for their lower success rates per man.
If only you could convice more women to participate, their success rates would drop to be as low as the men's...
If a quality project can't raise money elsewhere from more traditional fund-raising sources, might this indicate a subtle case of pre-selection quality bias instead of an indication of any anything to do with kickstarter campaign odds?
It could simply confirm that woman entrepreneurs often have less access to traditional funding sources because their industry contact lists are shorter in certain industries (which may or may not have anything to do with positive specific gender bias on kickstarter).
This is also consistent with the fact that in industries that tend to have more even female representation, they apparently lost the bias they were measuring...
I guess you can spin the results anyway you want...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anita_Sarkeesian
She basically takes $150,000 and takes a year to produce videos, until people complain with kickstarter about it being a scam, which were largely appropriated gameplay from other people's youtube channels.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/26/9-year-old-kickstarter-campaign_n_2949294.html
millionaire mom goes onto kickstarter to give money to her daughter to make video games, using emotionally manipulative and (probably fake) family controversy.
As I read the article, the researchers couldn't determine the sex of the contributors to the Kickstarter projects. But they did notice that tech projects started by women had more success getting funding. Their laboratory experiment indicated some women are more likely to support other women. So they conclude that the Kickstarter projects have the same causation.
I kind of wonder about that conclusion though. The type of person who would fund a Kickstarter project comes from a much different population than the (I assume) students they used in their lab. That said, it is a reasonable hypothesis. Obama certainly gets virtually all of the black vote, Hillary gets a lot of her support from women.
yeah that was my first thought, totally perverted. things involving webcams and internet are counted as startups
Reading TFA is seems by 'Kickstarter Goal' they mean getting funded.
Once you've got funded you have to actually do the thing you said you were going to do with the money.
If people are using gender to determine who they are funding, they are presumably displacing more rational metrics, like "does the project make any sense?", or "Does this person seem competent to do what they claim they can do?'.
Thus in those areas where gender bias is measurable in funding, I would assume the odds of eventual successful delivery to be reduced.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I've become accustomed to looking at the name of the submitter on slashdot articles. And today, I thought, "Nerval's Lobster... why does that name seem familiar?"
Oh, that's right, that's the account that links to an article on news.dice.com for every submission.
thank you. a new "code" phrase i plan to use.
Learn grammar you fucking morons!
BOOBIES!!!
Might as well donate...
By the logic of all the other stories about the gender/race inequalities in the tech world, we need to fix this inequality immediately. More male-led ventures need to be promoted to change this male-inhospitable funding environment!
SEXISM!!!!!!!
OMG!!! Call the Feds!!!!
Red alert!!!!
Your "esp" is on "high" setting today. Your prediction was correct. Of course, it doesn't take much as I am sure you know, to know that idiots are always predictably doing the wrong thing to hide truth like you told.
Really, who gives a shit?
last I checked, linux is on a majority of servers..
If I understand the summary correctly, women would be investing into projects just because the leader is female?
No no no! It's a communal/national bias? belief? also held by Google , the NSF, and other organizations, that there is a value in increasing women's participation in STEM and therefore gives money to projects that preferentially train/enable women in the sciences.
I don't believe Google and the NSF are run by women, and yet they share the bias. Also, at least for NSF, you don't have to submit a photo, so it's not just hot chicks . . .
Might as well face it I'm addicted to data.
Maybe the effect comes from women having on average more practical/useful projects? To get a bias like this, you only need a few guys posting crazy ideas for kicks.
Theres nothing wrong with dreaming big crazy shit projects but they might have a gender bias. Suppose I want to resurrect T-Rex, cross it with a rocket, and use it to blow up the moon, and I only need a billion dollars. This is a nice manly project, but would you give me 100$ to get a chunk of the moon? 1000$ for a chunk of the dinosaur?
There is nothing inherently bad about one group having a higher failure rate at a subset of their projects. I fail at a ton of crazy shit: it doesn't make me suck. What we have is an outcome: data. There isn't good evidence for any cause, or any reason to consider it an issue. Men and women differ by a statistically significant margin! I'd be amazed if that wasn't true (The more data you have, the smaller and less significant effects become statistically significant). I bet there is a difference racially, nationally and age wise too! Oh no, people are diverse, how can we fix it?
Except those males who are interested in STEM have to take the harder route of funding their endeavors. It's not ideal in any situation because an individual person who would be just as qualified may lose out on funding due to something as arbitrary as gender, race, etc.
Will increased minority representation in STEM, businesses, etc., be able to overcome the discriminatory practices of years past? Or will that issue still exist in one way or another?
Can we please get some government regulation to protect males against this kind of discrimination.
The more people bring things like this into the light, instead of just filing it away as a fact for a rainy day, the more it looks like we need more of this kind of thing.
Equality is not needing to mention things like this at every oppurtunity and just accept the ups and downs as a fluctuation in life, not some evil conspiracy to control a gender population...
Dumbasses
If you are a man and your have a women in your team, put her in front, whoever is the actual leader. Or maybe at least let your wife/GF/sister/whatever do the advertizing.
I believe it should better if she is hot (but not slutty) as it should work on both men and women.
This is assuming of course that the study is unbiased and that gender really matters (i.e. : causation, not simple correlation).
Can't you read? On desktops Linux loses badly when the numbers are combined. Care to debate that? Only reason linux had to run to smartphone toys was that. It can't win. Linux/Android only was successful on smartphone toys since it's no cost free and keeps per unit costs of smartphone handsets down. Nothing more and certainly not on overall technically superior grounds. All those years of "Linux = Secure, Windows != Secure" b.s. FUD spouted by Open SORES shills around here is all shot to pieces by the malware infestation rates Android sees, nearly daily, for years now also. You Linux fans have failed and Munich now getting ready to abandon Linux also seals the deal proving my points here all the more, and you know it. You lose.
How many of the women were just the girlfriends/wives/sisters of the actual men behind the project and simply put out front to sucker the average single male nerd on the Internet to give up their money? i.e. prostitutes for technology?
..to get men out of the workforce and replaced by masculine women.
"Women, on a particular sunday, in cosmetic based kickstarted products are better than men."
Replace the men!
Have you ever noticed how a hot chick will get frustrated and momentarily stand up on her toes then lets her heals drop to the ground. Making her boobs giggle.
I like that and don't want them to stop!
But do you think they are aware of what they are doing? (In general, I don't) Do you think mothers teach their daughters this trick? (No) Yet, many, many big boobed women display this body language.
Why? Because it has gotten them what they want in the past! Human interaction is subtle and hot chickness can be inferred one or two degrees of separation away, just by how horny men/bitchy women act when discussing the woman.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'