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."

Comments

Attractive females even more likely to get funded!

[HornWumpus]

It's not female solidarity. It's hot chicks taking men for chumps...kickstarter, no equity... requirements for supplying funding for nothing is chumpdum.

Re: Women should earn more than men.

[ShieldW0lf]

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"?