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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."

18 of 98 comments (clear)

  1. Attractive females even more likely to get funded! by HornWumpus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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'
  2. or you know, by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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...

  3. if a quality project can't raise money elsewhere by slew · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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...

  4. A lot of assumptions... by tomhath · · Score: 2

    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.

    1. Re:A lot of assumptions... by frup · · Score: 2

      It is natural human behaviour to form a bond with those who are most similar to us. That is the structure of all societies. Tribalism.

    2. Re:A lot of assumptions... by epyT-R · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Right. The problem is that when women do it, it's considered 'empowering.' When men do it, it's considered sexist bigotry.

  5. Kickstarter Goals? by TechyImmigrant · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  6. Re: Women should earn more than men. by ShieldW0lf · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Am I the only one who looks at this and thinks, "Here's clear evidence that, contrary to popular rhetoric, there is a powerful pro-female bias in this society, and any underrepresentation and underfunding that exists can therefore be entirely attributed to, I won't say failings... attributed to the character, capabilities and choices of women"?

    --
    -1 Uncomfortable Truth
  7. Re: Women should earn more than men. by TapeCutter · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Whatever it is, it's not sexist if a woman does it.

    --
    And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
  8. Re:See: Anita Sarkeesian by frup · · Score: 2, Interesting

    While you outline a scam by a woman which is relevant to this article, for comparison, of female started projects, how many are scams and vice versa? I would be willing to bet there are more male scammers out there (proportionally) than females, just as males are more likely to commit crime.

  9. Re:See: Anita Sarkeesian by vux984 · · Score: 4, Informative

    She basically takes $150,000 and takes a year to produce videos

    You have the time line wrong:

    She creates kickstarter

    Some people complain, send her rape-death-threat messages, and turn her online harrassment into a sport.

    She reports about THAT on her blog.

    Supporters aghast at the abuse she was subjected to respond by donating to her kickstarter to the tune of 150k.

    At least that's what the wikipedia article you linked to says; near as I can tell.

  10. Rational decisions? by manu0601 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If I understand the summary correctly, women would be investing into projects just because the leader is female?

  11. Re:See: Anita Sarkeesian by vux984 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    They deliberately push buttons with fallacy ridden, hypocritical content and then label the vitriolic response as proof of their victimhood.

    So a woman provocatively asserts 'men are pigs' and then the men respond by BEING pigs... and then she says... "see". Sounds like a slam dunk for her, and everyone who acted like a pig just got played as chumps.

    If that's really her game, then you're playing right into it. Only got yourselves to blame.

  12. Re:See: Anita Sarkeesian by vux984 · · Score: 2

    Hypocrites that ask for it deserve no sympathy.

    And yet sympathy funded her kickstarter to the tune of $150,000. Again, if your point is that she's deliberately inciting the abuse to collect on sympathy, then you also have to concede the abusers are chumps playing into her hand.

    Well, complaining about behavior while engaging in it is like slapping a 'kick me' sign on your back

    How was she engaging in the behavior she was complaining about? Was she sending rape-death threats? or writing games wherein you could beat up people she didn't like?

    Simply being critical of the gender stereotypes and tropes in video games hardly rises to that level of abusiveness? Give me a break. You can disagree with her all you like, but she was not dishing out what she received.

  13. Re: Women should earn more than men. by lagomorpha2 · · Score: 2

    Am I the only one who looks at this and thinks, "Here's clear evidence that, contrary to popular rhetoric, there is a powerful pro-female bias in this society, and any underrepresentation and underfunding that exists can therefore be entirely attributed to, I won't say failings... attributed to the character, capabilities and choices of women"?

    Women receive more sympathy from society than men, it's called the gender empathy gap. It also contributes to why the vast majority of homeless are men, lack of battered men's shelters despite spousal abuse being split 50/50 between the sexes, significantly higher suicide rate in men, etc. Anyone who hasn't noticed this is brainwashed by feminism.

    One of the side effects happens to be that often all a woman has to do in order to generate a substantial amount of money is cry a little on the internet and people will send her money even if they don't expect her kickstarter project to succeed.

  14. Re:See: Anita Sarkeesian by epyT-R · · Score: 2

    Yup. there are a lot of suckers out there. The people paying into her kickstarter are the chumps. I'm not talking about them. I'm talking about the few people in the community who deliberately feed her shit for her reaction (that game being an example). She baits this trollish behavior right to herself like flies to shit. Whether she does this knowingly for exposure or 'proof', or is genuinely offended, I don't know, but I have to believe she has the intellect to know what kind of reaction she'd get. Her attack on the community is in her generalizations concluding that most of the community has created this massive conspiracy against her, and that she's 'merely' an agency-less victim fighting for 'social justice'.

    What else does she do? Well you should watch her vids to see. She deliberately misrepresents the purpose and intent of game designers in various games to 'prove' her conspiracy theories. The implied scapegoat behind it all, of course, is the average male gamer, who is apparently both responsible for supporting as well as being misogynistically brainwashed by, these games. Implied conclusion: male gamers are stupid pigs. A feminist concluding such sexist generalizations under the guise of fighting sexist generalizations should not surprise anyone.

    She's also been found to be a fraud who claimed she was a gamer but was not. She's also been found to be using other people's playthrough videos as source material instead of her own. The video footage proving both of these is probably one of the big reasons she gets so much vitriol from gamers. No one likes a hypocrite, and people positively detest a preachy one who suckers people out of money with victim routines.

  15. Re: Women should earn more than men. by serviscope_minor · · Score: 2

    Women receive more sympathy from society than men, it's called the gender empathy gap. It also contributes to why the vast majority of homeless are men, lack of battered men's shelters despite spousal abuse being split 50/50 between the sexes, significantly higher suicide rate in men, etc.

    Yes this is all true.

    Anyone who hasn't noticed this is brainwashed by feminism,

    Actually feminism is about equality for men and women. If we become truly equal then that will no longer be a problem (along with a whole bunch of other shit). There are plenty of equally damaging beliefs about men and women.

    Mostly there's a dichotomy of men are ATTRIBUTE_X and women are -ATTRIBUTE_X.

    So men are seen as "tough" and women as "delicate" which is fundementally sexist. It also happens to hurt men as well as women because not all men are in fact "tough" and as you pointed out men need help too.

    But that's actually not the root cause.

    The assumption behind sexist things is that women are somehow lesser. This means that a man with attributes (e.g. what you said) which are seen as "traditionally female" is assumed to be a "lesser man" because he's more like a woman. And people don't like helping a lesser man because why bother, right?

    That's the flip side of the same sexism that feminists don't like. If women are no longer seen as lesser, then men in those situations are no longer seen as lesser men. At that point they'll just become "people in need of help", not lady-men in need of scorn.

    In other words, fighting sexism is win-win.

    --
    SJW n. One who posts facts.
  16. Re:See: Anita Sarkeesian by serviscope_minor · · Score: 2

    Well, complaining about behavior while engaging in it is like slapping a 'kick me' sign on your back and then using all the kicks you get as 'proof' of your victim status.

    No, to use your odd analogy, it's more like going online to complain that jerks keep kicking her, then a bunch more jerks join the party to kick her just because she called them jerks for wanting to kick her.

    I know you though. You're a regular on feminism threads (as am I!) and you seem to be convinced that women are doing far better than men and everything is about hating men and making them worse or something.

    --
    SJW n. One who posts facts.