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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."
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I read the wikipedia article on Anita Sarkeesian -- there was a brief mentioned regarding some controversy regarding her taking an extra year to make the videos, but nothing about it 'being a scam'. What was much more striking is the level of vitriol leveled at her for her work; in addition to the usual death/rape threats, some guy even made "an internet game called Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian", whose gameplay was apparently true to its namesake. I haven't seen the videos, so I can't say for certain, but based on the wikipedia article she wasn't singling anyone and attacking them in her videos (named "Tropes vs Women in Video Games"). Does anyone else see a problem here?