Having a Woman On Your Team Ruins Your Chances For VC Funding (theoutline.com)

Laura June, writing for The Outline: It's a well-known, well-documented fact that women entrepreneurs face an uphill battle in the fight to get funding for their businesses. But a new study suggests that it can actually be almost impossible. According to the study, published Tuesday in the journal Venture Capital, having even one woman on a company's team makes them far less likely to get funding than an entirely male one. In fact, an all male team is about four times more likely to get funding than teams with any women on them. The study was done by researchers at Babson College and Wellesley, and looked at data on 6,793 companies funded between 2011 and 2013. This is the first large-scale study in a decade to focus on women's efforts to get funding, and it's not encouraging. The authors write, "We did not determine any significant performance differences between companies with women CEOs from companies with men CEOs, so it is quite surprising that women are still, practically speaking, shut out of the market for venture capital funding, both as CEOs and participants of executive teams."

Comments

Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the VCs money, and they can do what they want with it.

Re: Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

But this sounds like it could violate the Rust Code of Conduct. If they aren't careful then the Rust Moderation Team may come after them to teach them about tolerance and acceptance.

Re: Good for them

[Sla$hPot]

I think you could do some statistics to identify sexist VCs and then come after them. Or you could just create a lower girl tax. Uhm no that would be moral. Let the lawyers figure out how to milk those poor girls :-/

Re: Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

Phrasing

Re:Good for them

[interkin3tic]

VCs might like to know they likely have a blind spot when it comes to good investments. They might also like knowing that their fellow investors likely are undervaluing some companies based on entirely illogical criteria. As TFS notes, performance wise outside of VC funding, there's no difference. There are probably VCs who are only interested in investing in companies run by dudes, but I'm guessing there are probably some VCs who are more interested in making money than maintaining a gender imbalance.

If VCs don't care about making wise decisions with their money, they can. Looks to me like no one is suggesting otherwise. I don't think anyone is suggesting they shouldn't be able to put their balls in a blender either. It's their genitals and they can do with them what they want. Definitely.

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe VC's know something about female-led businesses that the rest of us don't want to accept.

Re:Good for them

[Austerity Empowers]

More likely VCs do not respond to women's business plans or sales pitches, for whatever reason, real or perceived. We're talking about VCs, most of what they see, hear and act on is some degree of fantasy or another. Even successful investments morph over time from the pitch to the reality.

To get their money you have to appeal to some part of their lizard brain that makes them want to part with their cash, a combination of rationalization and vision. It's very likely that as they are mostly men, other men are able to identify with them and close the deal, whereas women are not.

I don't know what you do about that, and particularly wherein this is private money, there's nothing in the US that can (or imo should be) legally done about it. A lot of how the world is is based on personalities of rich people. Short of changing that, it is what it is.

Re:Good for them

[Triklyn]

perhaps the nature of business contributes to this. business is aggressive and competitive intrinsically, all-male teams may lack a moderating female influence and their presentations are on average more aggressive 'hungrier' than those with female team members, if only the creme of the crop, hungriest, most competent, stellar ventures and teams are going to get money, who's to say?

as jordan peterson is also likely to point out ... the average might be the same, that doesn't mean that skimming the top or bottom won't mean that you're only getting men only. in terms of CEOs, his exact example was that you've got a group of men who are more different than both the average woman, and the average man than the average man is from the average woman. it's just a bunch of crazy guys at the top that are driven to do nothing other than work... and everybody else. crazy guys like Paul Erdos, who literally lived mathematics to the exclusion of literally everything else.

if men and women and their 'aggression' is only 1 percent apart on average... but that's something that factors into what a VC might select for in candidate group... and .5 percent of potential companies actually get funding... that would virtually exclude all female groups...

who's also to say that the VC's figure that a core member of a team is a hungry female, a hungry young female that might someday want to start a family and will most likely, if that were the case, at least take a quarter of a year to pop out a kid? and that's a core member of a team, which isn't great at crunch time.

women tend to value work-life balance, and men are more likely to value 'providing for the family' and put in extra hours to get that promotion... which as jordan peterson has also pointed out... having a good work-life balance is a healthier way to live, the women may not be wrong in terms of living their lives properly... on the other hand, we in society and businesses in general prefer that men work themselves to death. that's just the nature of the beast though.

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe VC's know something about female-led businesses that the rest of us don't want to accept.

Posting as AC because of insanely politically incorrect opinion.

Fact: women are just as good in the business as men
Fact: women are just as good in engineering as men
Fact: women are just as good in entrepreneurship as men

But also, unfortunately:
Fact: women present a higher risk to VC funding than men.

Why? Male entrepreneurs don't get pregnant. Male entrepreneurs will 99.9% of the time not ask for parental leave. Male entrepreneurs typically don't need to go home to pick up their sick child from school at 1pm (because they are supported by strong women at home).

It's simply the "traditional' household roles that make more sense to a VC funder. Is it fair? Big fat no. But is it reality? Hell yes. And you can have 20 marches on Market Street in SF, but that shit ain't going to change anytime soon.

And on a side note, if you really want to march in favor of women's rights on Market Street in SF, start with protesting against women's situations in the Middle East or Africa. They are far more worse than here in the U.S.

Re: Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

Fact: Prefixing a sentence with the word "fact" does not make it true.

Re:Good for them

[wbtittle]

Women Engineers are likely just as good at Engineering as Male Engineers.

WOMEN are not as likely to become engineers as males are.

Engineers are slightly unhinged when compared to non engineers.

Engineers do not communicate as successfully to VCs as non engineers.

Women do not always know what it is they are communicating.

Females DO manage to get VC funding. Females are more than equally likely to be shunned by other females.

Life sucks. Get up to the plate and bat. When you strike out, get up again. If you are stuck on statistics, you do not know what is happening and need to leave the game. The game is not what it appears to be, but at the same time it is. If you are fixated on female/male differences YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT the game is. If you do not understand that there are differences between males and females, you do not know what the game is.

I do not know what the game is

Re:Good for them

[DougReed]

With a Subject line like "Good for them" and, although it is indeed true that "It's the VCs money, and they can do what they want with it."... Why is this tagged as "Informative"? It indeed documents how sexist and probably racist the business world is...

Sad yes... because it documents how far from the ideal of equality and selection based on merit instead of prejudice, but "Informative"? Only that the Anonymous Coward posting this subscribes to the prejudice.

Re:Good for them

[interkin3tic]

Are you reading the same comments I am? It seems pretty clear that a ton of dudes are more than willing to accept what you're suggesting, without needing evidence.

Re:Good for them

[interkin3tic]

Interesting point. I'd be surprised if some VC had not suggested, anonymously or not, that that was a reason. However I would note that they're looking at TEAMS which have women on them. If a team of four dudes is statistically more likely to get funded than a team of four dudes and a woman, then there's really not much logic to it.

But is it reality? Hell yes.

I'm glad you're convinced of your own thesis there?

And on a side note, if you really want to march in favor of women's rights on Market Street in SF, start with protesting against women's situations in the Middle East or Africa. They are far more worse than here in the U.S.

That's a false dichotomy. And that would be ineffective if not counterproductive, and everyone knows it. I mean, our war campaigns are counterproductive and that's just "drop bombs and bad guys die." Americans going over to the middle east and saying "Treat your women better" is sure to backfire spectacularly even if the language and cultural issues were sorted out. There are simpler ways of saying it, like "And feminists can go jump off the golden gate bridge."

Re: Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

Fact: Prefixing a sentence with the word "fact" does not make it true.

This is the only exception to that rule.

Re:Good for them

[bwcbwc]

Actually...VCs typically are mingling money from other investors with their own. So if the VCs are ignoring potential opportunities for a reason unrelated to the sales pitch, they are potentially leaving money on the table and costing their investors.

Correlation is not causation, and I'm sure this isn't a conscious discrimination in nearly all cases, but do any of you really believe that women are 75% less effective at developing any component of a business model than men? Financially? In HR? Marketing?
 

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

One Fiorini - - forever - - is enough ! $$$_slut, she whored-away one-of-three male-built pristine American engineering companies . Damn the bitch ... may her emitter currents always run low.

Re: Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem being feminists will scream and scream and scream until we're sick of it, demand government funding to 'fix' the problem, and then when the businesses fail blame misogyny.

Our ear, our wallets and economy will suffer, and it won't stop.

Re:Good for them

[bwcbwc]

"Fact: women present a higher risk to VC funding than men.

Why? Male entrepreneurs don't get pregnant. Male entrepreneurs will 99.9% of the time not ask for parental leave. Male entrepreneurs typically don't need to go home to pick up their sick child from school at 1pm (because they are supported by strong women at home)."

You are conflating work/personal issues suffered by the workforce at large with issues suffered by female executives.
1) Female entrepreneurs generally can afford a nanny.
2) If a female entrepreneur is on a startup's management team, don't you think there's an internal commitment to see it through?
3) Men may not have family life commitments (which is a statement I firmly disagree with, but I am accepting as a premise for this debate), but they have their own risks. They are far more likely to jump to a competitor for a bump in salary and/or control. This can be a risk on both ends of the jump. See recent lawsuits involving Oculus and Facebook/Zenimax.

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1168182/Catfights-handbags-tears-toilets-When-producer-launched-women-TV-company-thought-shed-kissed-goodbye-conflict-.html

Re: Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

Fact: This statement is not true.

Re:Good for them

[bwcbwc]

This at least is a slightly more plausible version of the hypothesis than originally stated, but it boils down to "VCs are more attuned to funding aggressive business plans and presentations" and assuming that such business plans are more likely to come from all-male teams.

"women tend to value work-life balance, and men are more likely to value 'providing for the family' and put in extra hours to get that promotion" - this runs completely counter to your assumption that the management teams on startups represent the top 1% of business people in the area.

You can't make an assumption that the top tier people (male or female) are different from average people and then explain away a data bias by using generalizations that apply to average people. You use the example that the top male may be more different from average men and women than the average men and women are from each other, but there is no corollary that the top men and top women are that much different or that the top women are less different from the average than the top men. (Note to all: I am using bias in a statistical sense of a data correlation that is skewed toward a particular subset not in the sense of a conscious or unconscious discrimination)

Re:Good for them

[DNS-and-BIND]

You poor dear...that "Informative" moderation triggered you, didn't it? You just had to come out and tell that awful disagreeing person that she's wrong. Now that equilibrium has been restored, you might want to sculpt some Play-Doh or play with a stuffed animal until you calm down.

Re: Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

Non sequitor absent premise has no veracity.

Re: Good for them

[zrobotics]

Are we still doing that?

Re: Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't have a problem with the one women on the team, they just don't have faith in the three men who were crazy enough to partner with her.

Re:Good for them

[AmiMoJo]

Male entrepreneurs don't get pregnant. Male entrepreneurs will 99.9% of the time not ask for parental leave. Male entrepreneurs typically don't need to go home to pick up their sick child from school at 1pm (because they are supported by strong women at home).

Thing is, companies with women on the team had better outcomes on average. They made the investors more money. So if anything:

Fact: all-male groups present a higher risk to VC funding than mixed ones.

Why? I can only speculate, but maybe because all-male groups where only 0.1% are willing to take paternity leave and don't participate so much in family life tend to burn out make poor decisions more often. Good work/life balance, something more common in mixed groups, produces better overall results.

Re:Good for them

[wyHunter]

Actually I suspect most male entrepreneurs do not have children nor women in their lives so do nothing but work, then get drunk at the weekend, sleep it off, then go back to work.

Re:Good for them

[ewibble]

I think what can be done is to educate people on what makes a good investment and what doesn't, and how we can be fooled. If we are conscious of it we can a least partially compensate. I don't think investors have some secret plan to keep women down. More likely it will be something about the way men present ideas that will attract them more. People frequently make unwise decisions based on form over substance. This probably a similar thing to something read recently saying we pick charismatic leaders over humble ones even though humble leader are generally better.

https://hbr.org/2017/04/if-hum...

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

If VCs don't care about making wise decisions with their money, they can. Looks to me like no one is suggesting otherwise. I don't think anyone is suggesting they shouldn't be able to put their balls in a blender either. It's their genitals and they can do with them what they want. Definitely.

You shouldn't jump into conclusion by either reading ./ summary or TFA. You should read the study itself and multiple questions should arise.

1. How many woman-led company proposed for funding from VC? No record on that.
2. Why didn't they dig deeper in the part where the number of funding company is rising for companies with woman as a part of leading team during those years (from 9% to 18%)? If this is a trend, why didn't they care much about?
3. All 3 authors are women, so could there be any bias toward the study?

So over all, I can see some sexism in the process, but I would ask "would it stay the way it is or change?" I believe it would change. Though, the data is too old (2013). I would want to see more current data with bigger range than that for a better analysis.

Re:Good for them

[ewibble]

3) Men may not have family life commitments (which is a statement I firmly disagree with, but I am accepting as a premise for this debate), but they have their own risks. They are far more likely to jump to a competitor for a bump in salary and/or control. This can be a risk on both ends of the jump. See recent lawsuits involving Oculus and Facebook/Zenimax.

Counter intuitively this may be the reason men win more venture capital, because men's priority is money (not saying its a good thing) and this matches the Venture capitalists priority, so they are more likely to appeal to them. (Just a theory)

Re:Good for them

[Triklyn]

actually, the example that peterson makes is with regard to high-power attorneys.

he claims, through his work consulting for law firms, that the really big firms can't keep their women. they don't know how to, because once the women hit 30, they ask themselves what the hell they're getting out of the job. they can either put in 60-80 hour work weeks for 300k or do a 9-5 at some other firm for 100k. and typically their partner, because women tend to marry up, is making as much or more than them. the firms don't want to lose their women, because they're exceptionally qualified, and exceptionally qualified is a small enough pool as it is... but they have nothing to offer them except more money and more stress.

exceptionally qualified is a tiny pool. and willing to put in 80 hours a week is vanishingly small, and those all tend to be men.

in addition, my point about 'providing for the family' is about the average male female... but that is not necessarily the governing principle at the high end. a certain amount of drive there isn't about money at all, in absolute terms, but in comparative terms. that subset of men just wants to be better than the son of a bitch to his right and left, and get more than them. ie) male aggression.

at the high end, resting on your laurels isn't a thing, vacation isn't a thing, winning is everything.

also, someone further down has made the observation that apparently, the authors of this study were looking at absolute numbers or something... so there is less likelihood of groups with women getting funding because there are less groups with women.

Re: Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

Fact: It does not make it false, either.

Re:Good for them

[ArmoredDragon]

I think what can be done is to educate people on what makes a good investment and what doesn't

And how would you do that? If there were rules about what makes a good investment and what doesn't, then we'd all be millionaires. They already have accountants who review the company's financials (this is and always has been step 1 for big investors) and from there it's usually an emotional decision. VCs in particular are a fickle bunch, but to be honest there is not and can not be a legal requirement for you to invest in a particular business based on social factors.

Re: Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

Are we still doing that?

Milking girls? By all means, yes!

Re: Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

Women, not girls dammit. Boys are so sexist!

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

omfg, the dog was a raped victim too

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, by experience, teams with women tend to have a more honest approach, less bs, less aggrandizement, less hidden figures that would kill an investment on its tracks.
Whoever in a VC who will back out on or not consider investing in a company because that company has a female exec on the the team are morons (and statistically wasting money), plain and simple, and going against hard data that has been known for a long time ( https://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2012/10/04/women-executives-make-venture-backed-companies-more-successful-study/ ).

Re: Good for them

[KGIII]

Maybe... Note the headline. It claims it ruins the chances. The summary then says it lowers the chances.

"When I use a word, it means exactly what I want it to mean."

Re: Good for them

[KGIII]

When all else is equal, the US government has to favor companies owned by women. It has been this way since 1994. In reality, however, it means women owned companies get about 5% of the government's dollars. Most women owned businesses are small companies and only about 25% of businesses qualify.

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

Thing is, companies with women on the team had better outcomes on average. They made the investors more money. So if anything:

Please give a source for that statement.

Re: Good for them

[Opportunist]

I agree, but every time I call them chicks I get hit by the bitches.

Re:Good for them

[Opportunist]

Ok, care to explain to us how the man could get pregnant instead? If you can solve that problem, I bet a Nobel Prize is in reach.

Not to mention that you'd have a huge impact on abortion laws.

Re: Good for them

[Opportunist]

In my experience, it usually does. If something really is a fact, there is usually little reason to stress it.

Re:Good for them

[Opportunist]

Why would I give a fuck whether the guy burns out after he tripled my money?

Burn-out happens somewhere between 5 to 10 years into the whole shit. By that time my investment has either paid off or it never will, and I'm off to the next project. With a hint of bad luck that woman is pregnant next year, before she can even double my investment.

Re:Good for them

[Opportunist]

Why this is informative? Because it is.

Sorry to break it to you, but people's money is theirs, and they, not you, get to decide what they spend it on and what they invest in. It is not their business to be "fair" or to "promote equality", unless this is what they want to do with their money. If it is your agenda, you're absolutely free to use your money to do just that.

Welcome to Capitalism.

Re:Good for them

[Opportunist]

Maybe they are less effective at choosing projects that VCs consider profitable? It would be interesting to see a comparison of the projects the VCs funded and which they rejected, and whether there is more to it than "a woman on the team".

Re: Good for them

[Opportunist]

Not to mention that companies will put up a female figurehead for the fed money. Don't think so? How many have hired the "quota ni...er" to get grants?

You bet they do.

Re:Good for them

[AmiMoJo]

Why would I give a fuck whether the guy burns out after he tripled my money?

Well, the stats say that that you would probably make more money if there was a woman on the team. The reason why is just speculation.

Great attitude, by the way, really showing the humanity towards your fellow human beings there.

Re:Good for them

[Evtim]

Maybe I missed it in the summary, but did they check if FEMALE VC behave the same? Cause one of the dirty secrets of today's world is that both men and women trust men more.

I have yet to see a woman in my trade (R&D Chemistry and Physics) who have not stated (while looking around so that other women do not hear her) that they prefer men as bosses just like they preferred men as teachers in school. "Men at work are interesting, innovative and creative, women are dull conformists and control freaks" is how it is usually stated.

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

Fact: women are just as good in $THING as men

Is that like... statistically or fundamentally? Because statistics are not kind. But of course there will be variance. What matters is if the difference is small.

If it's fundamentally.... man, that's a shitty way to lead up to the pregnancy thing.

Why? Male entrepreneurs don't get pregnant.

True but, this next bit?

Male entrepreneurs will 99.9% of the time not ask for parental leave.

Why the fuck is that? Do you have any idea how bloody disruptive kids are? Sure, the last three months of pregnancy aren't typically fun, but DEAR GOD that's nothing compared to the 6 months of sleep deprivation and massive lifestyle shift of becoming parents. I can't comment on the 2nd kid, but I've heard it's exponentially worse. Now, those people don't really do math, but I get the idea.

If the SJW crowd and marchers and businesses want to go for equality, set the expectation that dudes get to stay home when there's an infant.

Re:Good for them

[Opportunist]

Sorry, was channeling my inner VC. I'm a security consultant and penetration tester, forging personalities is part of the deal when you're hired for social engineering.

Re:Good for them

[AmiMoJo]

Would be interesting to see a study comparing the results of "hard nosed" don't-give-a-shit VPs to ones who feel a small amount of compassion. I have a feeling that the latter would ultimately do better.

Re:Good for them

[Opportunist]

In this world run by psychopaths? Not until you change that bit first.

Correlation is not causation

[Anonymous Coward]

The implication that all VCs are sexist-driven rather than profit-driven is a bit perplexing. These are the people that are like the Iron Bank from GoT. They probably don't even see the people for who they are, rather than just seeing us all as numbers, except possibly the one that claims to be the CEO for sheer viability.

Re:Correlation is not causation

[JoshuaZ]

The idea isn't that people are consciously putting sexism in front of profits but rather that they are unconsciously allowing sexism to cause them to underestimate their potential profits.

Re:Correlation is not causation

[KiloByte]

There's plenty bad you can say about Vulture Capital companies, but not that they're bad about correlating past chances for a startup to become profitable with various pieces of data about those startups, especially data that is easy to measure.

If they noticed that teams that include women are statistically non-negligibly less likely to succeed, they will use that knowledge. They don't care that you have a poontang instead of a wang, they care about what has historically been proven to give better chances of profit.

Re:Correlation is not causation

[Anonymous Coward]

>The implication that all VCs are sexist-driven

That's not the implication. The implication is that there is sexism, conscious or otherwise. If the data is correct then it clearly has a quite striking effect.

Re:Correlation is not causation

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably related to pregnancy -> childbirth -> child rearing -> no time for work. I've seen it several times; it has an enormous negative impact.

Re: Correlation is not causation

[alvinrod]

The issue (if it is one at all as you'd want to look for confounding factors to control for before leaping to a judgement) should be self-correcting. Assume for the sake of argument that all ventures are equally good regardless of the sexes of the team or that from a funding perspective they all have equally good returns. Investors who don't discriminate on sex would be able to get greater returns because there are fewer other VCs that want to invest so they can negotiate a better deal. Since the returns are just as good, those investors make more money and other investors start to adopt their investment strategy.

It really only takes one to figure that out and the market corrects. Of course not all projects are equal, so there is a question as to whether or not women are more disposed to be parts of projects that don't have as good of return potential as men.

I suppose I could read the study myself to see if this was done or attempted.

Re: Correlation is not causation

[Anonymous Coward]

Shhh, were all supposed to pretend that women don't take a huge amount of time off to give birth, or outright quit because they'd rather be fulltime moms.

Re: Correlation is not causation

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I can see, the data has two easily visible explanations.
1. VCs are sexist and don't like to fund teams with women on them.
Or
2. Women are more like to choose (or be placed) in projects that are less likely to receive VC funding

Correlation does not imply causation. Data and evidence has no meaning without interpretation.

Re: Correlation is not causation

[Anonymous Coward]

That is a similar argument to the issue of a "wage gap". If a company could get a woman who can perform the same job as a man at 78 to 92 cents on the dollar (depending on study), then they would stop hiring men and only hire the cheaper but equivalent women. That is why you need to look deeper at the factors other than gender to get a complete grasp of what is happening.

In the case of a pay gap (it isn't a wage gap), it is other factors like hours worked, breaks in work history, choice of professions, devotion to work over family, etc., that cause the average paycheck for a woman to be less than the average paycheck for a man (which is a pay gap, not wage gap, since having a different wage for the same job is illegal). I can't say what, but as you point out, there are probably other such contributing factors for the articles differential that account for some, most, or even all of the disparity.

Re: Correlation is not causation

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh nonsense. Most women I know work more effectively, multitask better, communicate more clearly, AND still manage to pull of this patriarchy's tired tropes of homemaking while the useless men in their lives go out for beers and play video games and slack off on the job.

The reason they're underpaid and under-represented is all you man-boys who think you know better slinging your "bwahahaha preggers" tripe from your mothers' basements.

The reason startups including them in their leadership teams can't get VC funding is because some of these same man-boy have somehow gotten out of the basement and through luck and the kind of hyper-aggressiveness that only comes from being caged away from society in a basement have made way more money than they know what to do with beyond spending it on hookers and booze probably made a pass at the women and were spurned, so retaliation was to not fund the startup.

Re: Correlation is not causation

[Anonymous Coward]

You assume a supply shortage of companies to invest in. If there are many companies seeking investment, an arbitrary and unfair mechanism for winnowing out companies would be an advantage (unless it's strongly anti-correlated with success; that is, the companies you refuse to consider due to arbitrary criteria can't be significantly more likely to succeed).

If there's no performance difference measured from having women on your team, as the linked study found, only choosing all-male teams is a safe winnowing criterion that reduces your work without making your remaining work harder. Thus there will be no punishment for sexist VCs.

Re:Correlation is not causation

[Anonymous Coward]

that idea is, in and of itself, sexism at it's highest art.

Rather than looking at something rationally it's been Decided that the reason is "Because Vagina".

Comparisons between _FUNDED_ projects show no major difference in return on investment. while no attempt was made to classify unfunded projects, beyond "Because Vagina"

What if the projects that have more women involved in them, are softer projects with less likely to succeed or have lower return on investment? Look at the statistical trend for gender and education. look at projects that Need degrees that have a higher percentage of women represented and look at the roi for those projects.

I'll be over here with my popcorn and the "Get Well Soon" balloon.

Re:Correlation is not causation

[epyT-R]

It's still a bad default assumption.

Re: Correlation is not causation

[Anonymous Coward]

GP has a point, though. We should be able to talk about these things.

Captcha: bimodal

Re: Correlation is not causation

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought about the second one too. Maybe women are statisticaly less likely to choose projects which are in for the hard coin, and more attracted to projects with, for example, idealistic values

Re: Correlation is not causation

[edtice1559]

A better comment than mine was already posted by an AC. However, the other point here is that, the mechanisms you are describing require time to take effect. If people of a particular gender or nationality were available cheaper, exploiting the arbitrage would close it and the problem would self-correct. But lots of data says that this hasn't happened. Clearly this arbitrage is, in many areas, *closing* but that isn't the same as *closed*. So the conclusion is either that (a) there really are differences between genders and races that make one more valuable than the other or (b) the natural forces that you describe take a long time to take effect. I tend to think it's the latter. If I'm a highly profitable sexist and racist company, I can stay that way for a *long* time. Eventually market conditions may change where somebody with better employees can eat my market share. But until then, I'm coming along making high returns (maybe not as high as if I weren't racist/sexist) and perpetuating discrimination. I think you are right that these forces will *eventually* close the arbitrage but the time frame will be longer than the lifetime of those currently in the work force.

Re:Correlation is not causation

[AmiMoJo]

If they noticed that teams that include women are statistically non-negligibly less likely to succeed, they will use that knowledge.

That doesn't seem likely or supported by any evidence.

More likely, they are mostly not consciously being sexist, deliberately discriminating against teams with women on them. Rather, there is subconscious bias. Both men and women exhibit this bias. Doesn't make them bad people, just human.

Re:Correlation is not causation

[gweihir]

Indeed. For this to have _any_ significance with regards to sexism, it needs to prove causation. Otherwise it means exactly nothing.

However, it gives us one data-point in a related discussion: This is yet another faulty argument trying to prove sexism against women. That tells me that the people trying to prove sexism against women are probably pretty bad at statistics. This study here was authored by four women. It would be interesting to see whether a) there is a correlation between bad statistics and female authorship and b) whether there actually is causation.

Re:Correlation is not causation

[quantaman]

The implication that all VCs are sexist-driven rather than profit-driven is a bit perplexing. These are the people that are like the Iron Bank from GoT. They probably don't even see the people for who they are, rather than just seeing us all as numbers, except possibly the one that claims to be the CEO for sheer viability.

Which is pretty much the opposite of what they actually do.

VCs don't care about the product, if the product was finished they wouldn't need VCs. The VCs care about the team, they're looking for people who can actually use the money that's given and bring the project to market. It's basically a fancy job interview.

That these VCs end up doubling down on the same biases as everyone else in entirely predictable, I'd expect the same results for start-ups with black team members as well.

Re: Correlation is not causation

[quantaman]

The issue (if it is one at all as you'd want to look for confounding factors to control for before leaping to a judgement) should be self-correcting. Assume for the sake of argument that all ventures are equally good regardless of the sexes of the team or that from a funding perspective they all have equally good returns. Investors who don't discriminate on sex would be able to get greater returns because there are fewer other VCs that want to invest so they can negotiate a better deal. Since the returns are just as good, those investors make more money and other investors start to adopt their investment strategy.

It really only takes one to figure that out and the market corrects. Of course not all projects are equal, so there is a question as to whether or not women are more disposed to be parts of projects that don't have as good of return potential as men.

I suppose I could read the study myself to see if this was done or attempted.

The 80's called and they want their assumption of perfectly rational economic actors back.

Re: Correlation is not causation

[Anonymous Coward]

The rebuttal of "you're wrong because you suck" is why we have Trump as our President.

No one wants to factor in childbearing into the equation as to why women are paid less or why they struggle to compete for certain jobs. And yet, this is happening, everywhere.

Re: Correlation is not causation

[Anonymous Coward]

didn't read the linked article (because /.), but i'm wondering, do the VCs in these cases actually *know* that there's a woman on the team? I'm sure there are biases, conscious or otherwise, many of which folks would like to minimize. how much of this is really causation, and how much is pure coincidence? i could read the article, maybe that's answered. but again, /.

Re:Correlation is not causation

[Anonymous Coward]

The implication that all VCs are sexist-driven rather than profit-driven is a bit perplexing. These are the people that are like the Iron Bank from GoT. They probably don't even see the people for who they are, rather than just seeing us all as numbers, except possibly the one that claims to be the CEO for sheer viability.

I just had a conversation with a woman entrepreneur last night after she attended a networking event for women entrepreneurs in Los Angeles same night. She stated quite emphatically that women are overlooked by VC, that it is near impossible for women run corps to receive investments from VC. Hence the event was designed to bring women together to invest in other women.

So, if women entrepreneurs know this as fact, seems us guys don't have much to speak of in regards to refuting the main gist of the article. If you have questions, ask to attend a womens entrepreneur meetup/event and pose the question to those who are on the receiving end. Rather enlightening.

Also, after being in tech for close to 35 years, this fact doesn't surprise me based on what I've seen at several corps around the world.

Re:Correlation is not causation

[hey!]

You are operating under the assumption that people (or even a subset of people) are rational. Here's a simple test: does "gut" instinct play any part at all in your decision making processes? If so, you are at least to some degree irrational. Don't feel bad, you have lots of company: the rest of the human race.

If you look at the historical efforts of venture capitalists, you have to conclude that they're as irrational as anyone else. What injects realism into the process is failure. The thing is, having a bias against female team members doesn't necessarily result in failure. It results in narrowed opportunity for success, but if the rational aspects of the VCs decision processes bias those decisions enough to success, he'll still make money, and he'll feel completely vindicated in his mistaken belief in his rationality.

It's a case of the dog that didn't bark -- in this case the investment that you didn't take that would have made you a ton of money. However, now that this is out, it's possible that some smart VCs will start looking for undervalued opportunities. It will only be a matter of time before we have our first female rock star tech entrepreneur, and that will change things.

Re: Correlation is not causation

[cayenne8]

Shhh, were all supposed to pretend that women don't take a huge amount of time off to give birth, or outright quit because they'd rather be fulltime moms.

Sssh.....soon, you'll have men wondering WTF they are forced to pay for maternal care on their medical insurance policies, even if single and/or no intention of ever having kids....

Re:Correlation is not causation

[AmiMoJo]

If you bothered to read the study, they vite evidence that proves causation:

"The effects of sex were investigated in a study of men and women pitching in three experiments, where the results showed that investors prefer pitches presented by men, even when the content of the pitch is the same (Brooks et al. 2014)"

"More specifically, another study of venture pitches finds different results, where sex of the entrepreneur does not influence investor preference for the venture but gender does, whereby there were systematic biases against femininity, and entrepreneurial competence was associated with masculinity (Balachandra et al.)"

Re:Correlation is not causation

[AmiMoJo]

According to the study, it's the exact opposite:

"Are there differences in performance outcomes between male and female entrepreneurs funded by venture capital?

When looking at outcome measures, we see that company valuations are significantly and consistently higher for companies with a woman on the team than those with no women."

Re: Correlation is not causation

[Anonymous Coward]

Alternatively, the problem could be self-fulfilling. You're assuming that there is no extra burden to overcoming sexist VCs and there most certainly is. This means that teams with women on them would need to spend more effort on securing VC funding and less time on their product. Making them less competitive. Making them less likely to succeed. So VCs make it even harder for non all-male teams to get funding. Spiral of death.

This is the reality of pretty much all discrimination, by the way. We like to think that the market will correct it via arbitrage but the reality is the barriers very quickly becoming self-perpetuating, even after the overt bigots have all died off.

Re: Correlation is not causation

[AmiMoJo]

An earlier study, cited in this one, looked at this issue: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi...

They made identical pitches and found that the gender of the person making the pitch affected the outcome. Both male and female investors were affected in the same way, biased against women making the pitch.

It's what is known as institutional sexism. The individual investors are not necessarily sexist or consciously biased, it's a more general bias in a society that portrays masculinity as stronger and more reliable or desirable.

Re:Correlation is not causation

[Anonymous Coward]

As much as they are profit driven, VCs are also largely idiots basing decisions on superstition.

Re: Correlation is not causation

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, well, if you've got *anecdotes* to back up your position, I guess the rest of us stand corrected.

Re:Correlation is not causation

[colinwb]

Non-obligatory Punch (defunct UK humourous again) cartoon - caption: "That's an excellent suggestion, Miss Triggs. Perhaps one of the men here would like to make it."

Re:Correlation is not causation

[HeckRuler]

Started out as a good argument then went down to crazy town.

"The effects of sex were investigated in a study of men and women pitching in three experiments, where the results showed that investors prefer pitches presented by men, even when the content of the pitch is the same (Brooks et al. 2014)"

Alright. That's informative and the sort of sociological work that I'd expect from real scientists.

"More specifically, another study of venture pitches finds different results, where sex of the entrepreneur does not influence investor preference for the venture but gender does, whereby there were systematic biases against femininity, and entrepreneurial competence was associated with masculinity (Balachandra et al.)"

....What? Ok, first off, if THIS study shows that sex doesn't have an influence, that directly contradicts the first paper. Hey, I get that, sociology is a soft and squishy science and studying it is hard. You're going to be able to find papers that come to different conclusions. The solution is a massive amount of reproduction. Boring and banal, but it's sociology, talk is cheap.

Second, how the hell could they separate sex from gender? Did they have 4 presentations:

• *Guy in a suit
• *Girl in a dress
• *Guy in a dress
• *Girl in a suit

Because if it's anything like that, they they're turning a pretty serious blind eye to the current sociological realities of the pool of people they're studying. If they're shocked that the guy in a dress raised eyebrows while the girl in a suit did not, then they're just completely out to lunch.

Re:Correlation is not causation

[Anonymous Coward]

So, if women entrepreneurs know this as fact, seems us guys don't have much to speak of in regards to refuting the main gist of the article. If you have questions, ask to attend a womens entrepreneur meetup/event and pose the question to those who are on the receiving end. Rather enlightening.

To be fair if we applied that same logic to the "fake geek girl" issue we'd conclude that because you can find tons of male geeks at any convention who are convinced the women there are all faking interest in the fandom based on their lack of sexual interest in opinionated neckbeards, it must be true.

But on the otehr hand yeah. Rich old men don't think a girl can get the job done, does not seem surprising. It could be anything from assuming you had the woman give the pitch to beguile them, to expecting women to be less lopsided on their work/life balance than men and preferring teams that will work themselves to death to realize the company. Also just age will cause a bias as it hasn't been that many decades since the days when women couldn't even have a credit card because they were assumed to be unable to handle the responsibility of the debt.

Re: Correlation is not causation

[alvinrod]

I don't think they take that long to take effect. For instance, it didn't take long for large amounts of certain types of labor to move to China or other countries when it become more financially viable to locate them their. If women are identical to men for all purposes of return on investment for business ventures in technology, then this suggests (assuming the results of this study) that there is a huge amount of arbitrage to exploit. Financial blue bloods (or at least the successful ones) go around looking for this kind of thing so they can exploit it to their advantage. With the amount of money being invested in this sector, there would be a lot of eyeballs on this.

Other posters pointed out potential issues with the methodology of the study (only looking at companies which successfully received funding) and there's another big one as well. The number of women in technology (in general, let alone who are involved in startups which may be even lower) is lower than men, so given that you probably would expect this result even if the population is all equally talented.

As for your other conclusions, I don't know why you ignore or dismiss (a) when it is quite clearly true from scientific literature. Men and women are clearly not the same from a basic physical standpoint so even if you assumed that they had identical interests outside of that (they don't anyway, but you can assume it for the sake of argument) then there are already a large number of jobs that are going to be stacked with men due to physical requirements. That alone means that if you have 100% labor participation that there are naturally some fields that must have significantly more women than men simply because there are about the same number of men and women in most countries and you've already allocated a lot of men to certain fields.

I also think you have another part of your argument backwards. If you're a highly profitable company that means there's added incentive for other people to break into your market. You're the last company that can afford to be sexist, because if your sexism is leaving you with a competitive disadvantage, it makes it even easier to unseat you. It's the cut-throat low-margin companies that can be sexist, because who wants to break into a market with a 2% profit-margin? Unless you've got a monopoly, complete customer lock-in, or the barrier to entry is incredibly expensive other players are going to want to get in on the game, and if you're leaving additional value on the table (e.g. not hiring qualified Asian workers) that makes it even easier for the new entrants to get in. The software industry has few of those things as evidenced by the large number of start-up companies that becoming massive players in the industry on an ongoing basis.

Re: Correlation is not causation

[alvinrod]

No actor is perfectly rational, but a free market ensures that the most irrational actors are quickly eliminated. If you don't believe me take two sums of money and invest one with an investment group and the other yourself using a random number generator to determine investment decisions and see which works out better. The argument isn't that all actors are perfect, but that if you see these results there's likely a rational reason for them or in the event that there isn't one, these results will soon cease to exist now that there is wide awareness of them.

But if you truly believe that all of these irrational idiots are leaving money on the table, you can invest your money instead in which case you should stand to profit considerably.

Re:Correlation is not causation

[DNS-and-BIND]

Look, it's not a debate. The USA, specifically VCs, are sexist scumbags who should be ended. Things have just gotten worse and worse lately and women are unwelcome in tech, not to mention the boardroom. We don't need any more enlightenment, these vile facts have been known for a long time. America has a lot to answer for with its backwards, sexist tech culture. Other countries are far more welcoming and provide a model for America to follow with regards to equality and lack of sexism.

Re:Correlation is not causation

[AmiMoJo]

You can read the paper they are citing. Basically they took it beyond just the sex of the person asking for investment by comparing pitches with different gender signifiers, meaning comparing feminine language, mannerisms, dress and the like with masculine versions.

So basically, the more masculine a woman acts the less she is disadvantaged. Appearance, tone of voice, choice of words etc. The mere fact that the investor knows the gender of the entrepreneur doesn't seem to have much effect, it's how they subconsciously react to the manner in which the pitch is delivered, which confirms the theory that the problem is institutional and not overt sexism.

Re: Correlation is not causation

[Anonymous Coward]

then they would stop hiring men and only hire the cheaper but equivalent women.

They would, but since women don't go into STEM fields, first they need to spend millions of dollars convincing women to go into STEM fields, then they can start saving money by hiring them cheap.

Re:Correlation is not causation

[bwcbwc]

This second one is interesting, as it implies there was cross-dressing involved so that males were perceived as women and vice versa. Either that or I don't understand the difference between sex and gender as sociological terms.
"More specifically, another study of venture pitches finds different results, where sex of the entrepreneur does not influence investor preference for the venture but gender does, whereby there were systematic biases against femininity, and entrepreneurial competence was associated with masculinity (Balachandra et al.)"

The difference between the scientists and most folks on this thread is that they're willing to develop new studies that test the alternative hypotheses proposed in opposition to their own conclusions. There's still the possibility of selection bias in promotion and media coverage where studies that confirm desired outcomes are touted while others are quietly shelved. If the pharmaceutical industry can do that, no reason sociologists can't. But eventually you reach a point where studies build on each other in ways that address all the alternatives and what you're left with is causation or at least high probability of causation vs. a small set of significantly less likely explanations.

Re:Correlation is not causation

[Anonymous Coward]

So, either venture capitalists are choosing teams that will make them less money, or academics are fudging the numbers. Which would you like to bet?

Bear in mind that venture capitalists are under enormous financial pressure to get the best return from their capital, and academics are under substantial political pressure to produce results that support a feminist narrative.

Re: Correlation is not causation

[greenfruitsalad]

i'd rather employ 1 person who can singletask properly than 3 people who claim to multitask with ease. as far as I can tell, multitasking is a myth perpetuated to women by (mostly) other women and (possibly) the single biggest hindrance to their effectiveness in any job.

Re: Correlation is not causation

[AmiMoJo]

It's hard for investors to overcome their subconscious biases, even when the rational part of their brain knows that mixed teams are a better investment. The study looked at outcomes and found strong evidence that mixed teams provided a significantly better ROI than all-male ones.

The problem is that the bias is really subtle. The investor perceives the pitch as weaker when coming from a woman (again, two studies demonstrating that with repeatable experiments are cited) so they think it's more risky, and even if their conscious mind tells them it's happening and that statistically it's a better investment... The pitch is very influential, especially when you are betting on something new and unproven from new people with no prior record of success (if it were otherwise they wouldn't be asking you for money).

Re:Correlation is not causation

[bwcbwc]

You're assuming that the cross-dressers were detected as such by the VCs. The whole point of the study would have been to make the cross-dressing indetectable. I would also expect some "Pat" or "Chris" characters that were dressed ambiguously to serve as a control.

Re:Correlation is not causation

[Anonymous Coward]

systematic biases against femininity, and entrepreneurial competence was associated with masculinity

Possibly they defined "masculinity" as "confidently demonstrating that you know what you're talking about", and "femininity" as the reverse. This would give them the result they're after.

Re: Correlation is not causation

[bwcbwc]

There are also at least three scientific studies referenced in this thread that support that position. The main one in the article and two cited in the main study that have been referenced here.

I have yet to see anyone in this thread cite a study that supports the position that the apparent bias is caused by factors other than perceived gender.

Re:Correlation is not causation

[Khashishi]

Your argument makes no sense. Sure they see numbers. But the numbers they see are incorrect because they are sexist.

Re: Correlation is not causation

[whh3]

From what I can see, the data has two easily visible explanations.
1. VCs are sexist and don't like to fund teams with women on them.
Or
2. Women are more like to choose (or be placed) in projects that are less likely to receive VC funding

Correlation does not imply causation. Data and evidence has no meaning without interpretation.

Data have, not has.

Re:Correlation is not causation

[allo]

Yeah, get more factors into your data. Maybe women prefer projects, which have less VC chance because what they are doing, while women like the teams because of what they are doing.

Re: Correlation is not causation

[Anonymous Coward]

Some roles though do require multitasking, and even if done badly, is still better than not being done at all.

Re:Correlation is not causation

[serviscope_minor]

There's plenty bad you can say about Vulture Capital companies, but not that they're bad about correlating past chances for a startup to become profitable with various pieces of data about those startups, especially data that is easy to measure. ... said no one who dealt with venture capitalists ever.

Example: theranos raised half a billion dollars off the back of empty proises. Google vetures actually did due dilligence and sent some blood samples in anonymously to see if their results were valid. Google ventures chose not to invest.

That information was out there for about $100, yet many large investors didn't bother to look. They're a bunch of bloody sheep. As far as most of them seem to care, "due dilligence" means "did someone else invest yet".

So tell me again how rational venture capitalists are, go on.

Re:Correlation is not causation

[KiloByte]

I did not say their methods work well. They are deep in love in data mining: if startups which submit their papers typeset in Calibri have statistically better results than those typeset in Cambria, the VCs will discriminate against the latter. They don't try to find causation, they religiously follow any correlation that looks like it'd let them pick more profitable places to put their money into.

But there's no malice here. The VCs are not sexist, they merely noticed a statistical difference and rushed for it.

(And as you can find elsewhere in the comments, the statistical analysis of what VCs did was likewise flawed.)

Re:Correlation is not causation

[Cederic]

No, it confirms the theory that there's a way to present a winning pitch and both sexes are able to learn and adopt it.

You appear to be sexist in assuming that women are incapable of learning how to appeal to an investor.

Re: Correlation is not causation

[Anonymous Coward]

This study does not use the methodology you mentioned or reach the conclusion you mentioned. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13691066.2017.1349266

What is the study you are referring to where they gave identical pitches? It sounds interesting.

Re: Correlation is not causation

[Anonymous Coward]

An earlier study, cited in this one, looked at this issue: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi...

They made identical pitches and found that the gender of the person making the pitch affected the outcome. Both male and female investors were affected in the same way, biased against women making the pitch.

It's what is known as institutional sexism. The individual investors are not necessarily sexist or consciously biased, it's a more general bias in a society that portrays masculinity as stronger and more reliable or desirable.

In other news, women are attracted to more masculine men. Well, no shit sherlock. Its called biology, look it up.

Re:Correlation is not causation

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on how they conducted the study, they actually asked people to be on whether or not they believed that in the past companies led by women were more likely to be successfully funded than companies led by men. If you believed that there had been historical bias, then you should have bet on the companies presented by the male voice, even if you thought women were equally capable of running companies. Because they are going to pay you based on whether this past company succeeded in getting funding or not. So essentially, they there was an incentive to play along with the narrative of perceived discrimination.

Re: Correlation is not causation

[edtice1559]

If you want proof of the staying power of the incompetent, look only at RIAA / MPAA. They are getting displaced in the sense that Netflix and Amazon are now creating original content. Established players create barriers to entry. If the established players have some sort of bias (not saying any of the above organizations do), those barriers to entry will protect the bias. It takes a long time for established players in any industry to get displaced.

Re: Correlation is not causation

[Opportunist]

I stopped at "patriarchy". Ya know, it triggers me, you could at least have included a trigger warning!

Re: Correlation is not causation

[Opportunist]

What do you mean "soon"? I am wondering just that.

If you want to get pregnant, fine, but leave me out of it!

Re:Correlation is not causation

[Opportunist]

VCs are statistics driven. Nothing else. You think your sales pitch sells your product? Wrong. Your sales pitch only tells him just how much of a salesperson you actually are and whether you can convince some idiot to buy your shit, and how much you actually believe in it yourself, whether you have yourself "bought in" or whether you're just doing what he does: Not giving half a shit about your product and only want a lot of money out of it. Because that's not what he needs. That's what he is. He needs someone who would ride this product to the end even if it doesn't look promising for a while.

That's all your sales pitch does. The rest is statistics. Rest assured that there is actually some performance figure for "number of men" and "number of women" on the team. Yes, it's sexist. But the whole process is an -ism.

You want to bet that there's also figures for "how many blacks", "how many Jews", "how many $ethnicity"? You bet there is. I wouldn't even doubt that there is one for "how many gays".

They are essentially trying to put crystal ball reading onto scientific legs. And you really expect them to not run statistics on even the most ridiculous metric? Seriously?

Re:Correlation is not causation

[Opportunist]

That's because they use a different reasoning than you do. VCs don't care whether a product someone promises works. That's not the business they're in. What they care about is whether they can eventually sell their share of the company for more than they put in. That's all. That may well mean to invest into a company that you know will never produce anything, as long as you also know that it will be bought by a rival before they'd have to fold and admit that they never had a product to begin with.

Yes, that's a big gamble. But that's the business they're in.

Essentially, VCs don't know what they invest in. They are basically running a risk-reward game. They run statistics on your proposed company and if it shows enough promise, they will actually even accept a higher risk.

Re: Correlation is not causation

[Anonymous Coward]

I think, AmiMoJo, that it's actually hard for you to overcome your subconscious bias. No matter how many posts you read demonstrating that the foundation of this article is wrong, its logic is flawed and its conclusions incorrect, you never ever accept them in the slightest, and just go a different thread to try to reinforce your preconception over and over again.

Re:Correlation is not causation

[serviscope_minor]

I did not say their methods work well

Your claim is that they have methods beyond gut feel. I dispute that.

They are deep in love in data mining

No, they like big ideas, charismatic founders and optimistic sales projections. Look at today's story about the collapse of Lily drone for example.

They don't try to find causation, they religiously follow any correlation that looks like it'd let them pick more profitable places to put their money into.

Except as the article pointed out, they're actually going against the correlation, not with it.

But there's no malice here.

Whoever claimed malice (though in the case of VCs I wouldn't discount it, pretty much on general principle) ? Subconscious bias is not malicious but it is still bias.

The VCs are not sexist, they merely noticed a statistical difference and rushed for it.

Except that isn't remotely how VCs do things.

Re:Correlation is not causation

[serviscope_minor]

They run statistics on your proposed company and if it shows enough promise, they will actually even accept a higher risk.

lol you've not dealt much with real VC's have you.

Even VCs are rude about other VCs.

Re:Correlation is not causation

[HeckRuler]

No, I actually can't. Their own link to the "forthcoming"? paper just runs a search on google scholar and the link is broken as it returns zero hits. Searching for the paper "Don't pitch like a girl" by Balachandra doesn't get me there either. All I could find was This news blurb.

Oh look, "in fact, she says, 94% of venture capitalists are male".

Act like the venture capitalists and they'll be more approving of you? Gasp.

And it was: "Coders noted whether the presenter was male or female and then measured whether he or she exhibited stereotypically masculine behaviors (such as forcefulness, dominance, aggressiveness, and assertiveness) or stereotypically female ones (warmth, sensitivity, expressiveness, and emotionality)." Go figure, VCs want entrepreneurs to be assertive, but not an emotional mess. They don't want the CEO to make friends, they want them to make money. Business is not a democracy. ...OK, unless it's a co-opt.

If it's institutional, it's that all the people with money are dudes, or it's hinged on the fundamental basis of capitalism. The first you can change by unfairly supporting women VCs. (And Balachandra worked at an all female VC fund that only gave money to female entrepreneurs... ). The second you can't change.

Re:Correlation is not causation

[Anonymous Coward]

There's plenty bad you can say about Vulture Capital companies, but not that they're bad about correlating past chances for a startup to become profitable with various pieces of data about those startups, especially data that is easy to measure.

If they noticed that teams that include women are statistically non-negligibly less likely to succeed, they will use that knowledge. They don't care that you have a poontang instead of a wang, they care about what has historically been proven to give better chances of profit.

Maybe you didn't read the sentence that stated: "We did not determine any significant performance differences between companies with women CEOs from companies with men CEOs,"

Or maybe you are confusing how Venture Capital companies OUGHT to act, with how they DO. If they systematically and consistently make NEGATIVE decisions (i.e. decisions NOT to fund) ventures with women on the management team, then their loss is an Opportunity Loss. It can only be identified as such if another company DOES fund the venture. The data available tells us about the failure of companies that DO get funding not about the lost potential in cases of failure to launch.

Re:Correlation is not causation

[Opportunist]

You call it rude, for them it's just business.

You are statistical value. If you're lucky, you're an asset. But that "human" thing never enters the equation.

Re: Correlation is not causation

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on whether data is plural or singular. In my mind data refers to a singular collection of information. It can (and has) been argued either way.

Re:Correlation is not causation

[serviscope_minor]

It's quite clear you've never dealt with VCs.

Not looking at pipeline

[ranton]

I have only read through the paper's methodology section and conclusion so far, but it appears they didn't look at the total number of pitches by companies with at least one woman founder. They only looked at companies which did receive funding. Their study therefore says nothing about whether women on your founding team has anything to do with whether you will get funding. It just says there are less women founders.

This isn't just a case of the article having a misleading title. The study itself makes conclusions it cannot back up.

Re:Not looking at pipeline

[Anonymous Coward]

If the end quote is accurate (I didn't RTFA), it clearly sounds like political BS with an agenda.

Re:Not looking at pipeline

[CptLoRes]

Sadly, this was pretty much exactly what I expected. It is no longer just news that are hyperbole, but also so called scientific studies.. Showing that VC funded teams are overly represented by males (no big surprise there), does not correlate to women being excluded unless you can show a matching trend of teams with women in them being refused VC.

Re:Not looking at pipeline

[gweihir]

That is a pretty bad fail. Their results are completely meaningless.

Re:Not looking at pipeline

[Anonymous Coward]

Welcome to the world where graduates of the social sciences try to engage in real science. Their poor decision making skills continue after college. There's a surprise. You can bank on it, and it looks like rich people are getting rich understanding that.

Re:Not looking at pipeline

[AmiMoJo]

Their study therefore says nothing about whether women on your founding team has anything to do with whether you will get funding. It just says there are less women founders.

That is incorrect. You are assuming that "received venture capital" is a single, one-off event with equal value every time. As they make clear in the study, it's not. Companies get multiple investments, and the investments differ in size. Therefore, what they look at is not the number of investments if a binary invested/not invested, but the total monetary value of those investments per company.

With a sample size of over 6000 in a timeframe of 2 years, that's statistically valid. They acknowledge that there may be other factors at work, but none of them could account for the very large discrepancy.

Re:Not looking at pipeline

[Anonymous Coward]

The 'news' hyperbole is a technique to persuade a significant percentage of the voting population. Most people do not read past the headline so they believe the headline on face value...

Too often activist try to persuade by fooling the population through correlation and blind statistics and not true causation...

Re:Not looking at pipeline

[Anonymous Coward]

That is exactly what they found: Teams with female members were offered substantially less VC funding. It says it right in the article and even the /. summary, which you clearly didn't read.

Yes, there are much fewer teams with female members, but that's statistically irrelevant.

Re:Not looking at pipeline

[Anonymous Coward]

But if A series companies that have women on the team don't do as well as those without, it's natural to assume they would receive smaller B rounds. (Substitute angel/seed/A/B for A and B as long as timeofevent(A) < timeofevent(B)).

So, maybe teams with a women on them just are not as successful and funding is just reflecting this.

For example, maybe teams with women on them are less productive because they spend too much time on political correctness and waste resources sugar coating things out of fear of being "sexist" or "creating a hostile work environment". So, when working with a male (esp. if there are no females in the room), one would just yell across the room

"Hey, Bob, you fucktard -- where the fuck did you learn how to code? Just because you learned to suck your mother's cock and swallow doesn't mean you should silently swallow exceptions that callers expect to see. Fix your fucking code and stop wasting real programmers' time stumbling across your fucking bugs.

"One and done" - message delivered clearly and efficiently. If Bob has any professional or personal pride it will be a long time before he doesn't double check his exception handling code. And, if he doesn't check his exception handling code and repeats the screwup a couple more times, everyone will know about all the incidents and be telling the CEO to fire Bob who will do so without being fearful of being "sexist".

On the other hand, if Alice committed the bug, they feel compelled to walk over to her and quietly say

Alice, I wanted to discuss some code with you that you just committed because I don't understand it. I'm sure I'm missing something because your code is always perfect so there is obviously a reason the code swallows an exception. Can you help me understand your code? I'd be very appreciative of your valuable time if you could find time in your gossip schedule to help me.

So, of course, Alice continues to swallow exceptions (and perhaps some other things behind the CEO's wife's or girlfriend's back) and everyone has to deal with the consequences. Other team members don't know Alice swallows so aren't on the lookout for her messy exception handling. And that's all on top of the time wasted by walking over and having a long discussion rather than dealing with the matter crisply.

Re:Not looking at pipeline

[bwcbwc]

Not exactly. The study in the article cites two previous studies that showed that identical pitches were more likely to get funding if they were made by men than if they were made by women. This study proceeded from the assumption that VCs were already biased in selecting all male teams because the previous studies had already demonstrated the pitch bias. This study was looking at the outcomes regardless of how the pitch was given.

There's still the possibility of flaws in the previous studies, nobody on this thread has dug down to level 3 on either side of this debate.

Re:Not looking at pipeline

[Anonymous Coward]

That's both sad and true.

Re:Not looking at pipeline

[epine]

The correct metric here is return to VC investor. Perhaps teams with women are less easily shaved in a subsequent down round. Then it would be rationale for VC investors to eschew EQ on the business-end of the puppet strings.

Re:Not looking at pipeline

[epine]

The purpose of my post was to troll-shame the one-trick ponies, which was so easily accomplished, I managed to press "submit" without even stopping to think.

If teams with women have a different pattern of returning hat-in-hand for a subsequent round (perhaps with better foresight and anticipation, hence less desperation and better leverage) then the VC could very much end up munched in the ass by imprudent gender equality.

Re:Not looking at pipeline

[Anonymous Coward]

Not exactly. The study in the article cites two previous studies that showed that identical pitches were more likely to get funding if they were made by men than if they were made by women. This study proceeded from the assumption that VCs were already biased in selecting all male teams because the previous studies had already demonstrated the pitch bias. This study was looking at the outcomes regardless of how the pitch was given.

There's still the possibility of flaws in the previous studies, nobody on this thread has dug down to level 3 on either side of this debate.

There is a problem with the previous study though. And that is that what they really showed is that people are willing to bet that venture capitalists had pitch bias in the past. Because what they did was show an identical pitch with a male or female voice over. And the participant had to rate it and decide if it got funded. And it the participants ratings matched venture capitalists, then they got financially rewarded. So, now the whole thing becomes a game. As a participant, I am incentivized to pick pitches by males because I believe that you probably wouldn't be doing the study unless you thought that the males had an unfair advantage. Presumably, you didn't tell me the part about you randomly switching the audio. Also, as a participant, I am going to try to rate things according to what I think your bias is, so I get more money. Because, I assume that you won't design the experiment in a way that would penalize people for playing along.

Imagine I was going to pay you to rate political speeches that were given to a group of rich white republicans and pay you if the ratings matched their ratings. If you believe that rich white Republicans have some good old boys network thing going on, then you probably ought to rate presentations given by females lower in order to maximize your profits. Even if you thought they didn't, you probably should still do that because if I am designing this study, I am likely to select the subset of studies where women were unfairly penalized. (Again, assuming the participants don't know the voiceover is random.)

Another worthless SJW non-study.

[will_die]

They only used companies that got funding and ignored the composition of companies that requested funding but never got it.
Based on that you might as well say this study shows that companies with a women in lead position comes up worse ideas then a team of all men.

Re:Another worthless SJW non-study.

[interkin3tic]

"This study has flaws, therefore I'm going to believe the exact opposite of their conclusions."

Based on that you might as well say this study shows that companies with a women in lead position comes up worse ideas then a team of all men.

Well, occam's razor would suggest no, especially given that numerous other studies have demonstrated that people are often biased against women. And the study notes that the success rate varies between states. So your alternative hypothesis is that magically, VCs are immune from biases that are well documented, and it's just women from some states have worse ideas that men in their groups accept.

Also, startups aren't all about ideas. Often they have very little to do with ideas and more to do with credentials of the founding team.

Is there an available data-set of companies that attempted to gain funding and didn't, let alone their gender breakdown? I tried to start a company briefly and received no funding. It's not a formalized process, there wasn't a department of startups we had to get a license from. The only way you'd know it ever happened is if you talked to one of the four or five people involved in our pitch.

The fact that you say "SJW" suggests to me you're already biased against the conclusions from the start. There are probably VCs who care less about "mens rights" and that nonsense and more about making money, they might be interested in being aware they and their competitors might have a bias even if the study is not the word of god.

Re:Another worthless SJW non-study.

[edtice1559]

Well if I already believe the exact opposite of a study and it comes out flawed, of course that reinforces the existing belief. A study tried to prove the opposite and failed. That's not evidence of absence but sure is a strong indicator. It's probably very *hard* to get a census of all teams that have pitched for VC funding and any sampling would be rife with sampling bias problems. If 5% of total teams have women on them and 10% of funding goes to teams with women, this shows a bias in *favor* of women. I'm not saying that's what happened here. The problem is the article is essentially stating the 10% number and saying that the VCs have bias against women. If there are no women on the teams getting funded, there is *some* sort of gender problem for sure. But there's no reason to believe that the study has accurately identified it.

Re:Another worthless SJW non-study.

[Baloroth]

And the study notes that the success rate varies between states.

Here's the problem: the study, as far as I can tell, at no point actually gives the success rate, in any way. It only talks about the percentage of funded companies with women on the executive team. That's all. It then pretends that that percentage is some kind of proxy for a success rate, but it isn't. It could, in fact, be that all companies with women on the executive team that apply for funding get it (which would imply that VCs actually have a strong bias towards women-run companies), and there just aren't a lot of such companies. It could also be that very few such companies receive funding (which would imply the exact opposite, that VCs have strong anti-women biases). In other words: the study tells us exactly nothing about VC bias for or against women. And the study does make this claim: it says women are "shut out" of VC funding, but it in no way shows that.

Is there an available data-set of companies that attempted to gain funding and didn't, let alone their gender breakdown? I tried to start a company briefly and received no funding. It's not a formalized process, there wasn't a department of startups we had to get a license from. The only way you'd know it ever happened is if you talked to one of the four or five people involved in our pitch.

No, there probably isn't such a data set. You know how to fix that? You go out and you make the data set. That's what science is all about. It's not easy, but few things worth doing are.

Re:Another worthless SJW non-study.

[Anonymous Coward]

Occams razor does not mean "if a lot of people say it it's surely true!"

"The study has flaws, but I'm going to ignore them because other studies agree with it."

Re:Another worthless SJW non-study.

[Anonymous Coward]

How on earth do you think a study not proving something is a strong indicator that the thing is true? You don't get to pretend you proved something because you didn't but doing so would be really *hard.* That's not how science works.

Can you imagine? "Yeah the rocket blew up on the launch pad killing all aboard and 20 odd ground crew. But I mean, do you see how far the bloody moon is?"

"I see. Well you nearly made it. I mean I saw the rocket wobble a bit before the explosion. We'll go announce your success to the press now!"

Re:Another worthless SJW non-study.

[interkin3tic]

I know, apologies for being unclear. I'm saying "People are biased is a simpler explanation (particularly when we already know people are biased) than 'women are inferior at this'."

Re:Another worthless SJW non-study.

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that you say "SJW" suggests to me you're already biased

So, suppose an officer of the NAACP calls David Duke a racist. Does that mean that their critique of a study concluding that the KKK is the organization most responsible for "American Excellence" in the past 200 years is irrelevant?

Re:Another worthless SJW non-study.

[AmiMoJo]

It only talks about the percentage of funded companies with women on the executive team. That's all.

No, it doesn't talk about that at all. You haven't read it, have you? You are just pretending to have.

The study doesn't look at the percentage that were funded. How could it, when no-one keeps stats on how many pitches were received but rejected? What it looks at is the amount of money invested via VC funding in over 6000 companies in a two year time span, and what proportion of that funding went to companies with at least one woman on the team making the pitch. Not even the executive team necessarily, just near the top of the company. It's all detailed in the study.

They found that such companies get less VC funding by quite a big margin, despite on average providing a significantly better return on investment.

Re:Another worthless SJW non-study.

[Anonymous Coward]

Like clockwork every story, every thread. You post this drivel that some people love to believe when provably not true. Your entire posting history can be described as: men bad women good, women victims men abusers.

Emotions over facts. Post rationalization over science. It's this never ending tidal wave of stupid. There is a reason why you have been banned by other news sites that popped up during slashdot beta.

Re:Another worthless SJW non-study.

[edtice1559]

No the point is that if I think its impossible to go to the moon and you try to prove me wrong by building a rocket and having it explode and kill twenty people, I'm now even more sure of my belief that it's impossible. To change that belief you will have to actually go to the moon. You can't came and say "look how close my rocket was." I reread my comment and I don't think it was so hard to follow.

Re:Another worthless SJW non-study.

[Kielistic]

That is still not how Occam's razor works. Occam's razor is not an entry point for a non sequitur.

Re:Another worthless SJW non-study.

[Anonymous Coward]

This entire discussion consists of various people posting about how the article is misleading, followed immediately by AmiMoJo defending it.

So - is "Having a Woman On Your Team Ruins Your Chances For VC Funding" really supported by the underlying article, or what it says is simply somewhere between "Having a Woman On Your Team Means You Get Less VC Funding" or "Having a Woman On Your Team Means Nothing About VC Funding".

Reap What You Sow

[Anonymous Coward]

When TV cameras are tripping all over themselves to put women who scream about workplace sexual harassment in front of the lens, then what did you think was going to happen? Venture capitalists aren't stupid. The easiest way to avoid having to put out a public relations fire is to remove the kindling from the equation entirely.

Re:Reap What You Sow

[serviscope_minor]

Venture capitalists aren't stupid.

You've never dealt with VC's have you?

Re:Reap What You Sow

[Anonymous Coward]

The one that complain are not the bosses.
The best way to avoid it would be either to only have men, bad idea, and pretty hard. Or to have women among the bosses, so that it doesn't devolve into a boy's club with blackjack and hookers.

Misleading conclusion

[Ty]

Misleading summary and conclusion from a website that with a subtitle of, "Did we ban men yet."

Direct quote from the study:

The average dollar investment in businesses with a woman on the management team was slightly higher for all three years during 2011â"2013, $12 million for those with women, $8 million for those with no women.

Re:Misleading conclusion

[Anonymous Coward]

^ This. The headline directly contradicts the actual verbiage of the study.

Re:Misleading conclusion

[Anonymous Coward]

The didn't ban men yet, in fact, there are plenty of men in their editorial.

Re:Misleading conclusion

[aardvarkjoe]

The average dollar investment in businesses with a woman on the management team was slightly higher for all three years during 2011Ã"2013, $12 million for those with women, $8 million for those with no women.

That's kind of an odd statement. Since when is a 50% difference "slightly" higher?

Re:Misleading conclusion

[green1]

In the same world where women were "shut out" while still getting funding, and where a conclusion about the percentage of teams with women getting funding was made without counting how many did not. (a percentage requires both a numerator, and a denominator to calculate!)

In other words, this is a biased, sexist, political hit piece, and not a scientific study.

Re:Misleading conclusion

[Anonymous Coward]

And a different, but related topic - if a woman owns a company the federal government will bend over backwards to give them work. And if it is a black woman, the government procurement people practically have an orgasm.

Re:Misleading conclusion

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet the numbers would skew differently if they include this VC:
https://femalefoundersfund.com/

Re:Misleading conclusion

[green1]

There is actually tons of grants and funding that is designated exclusively for women, there is none that is designated exclusively for men.

It's time to stop gender BS

[Anonymous Coward]

Please stop posting BS gender issues on slashdot once and for all... It's not tech news, it's not nerd news, it's not news you want to hear, it's not even a news... It's just BS.

There is about 96% male CEOs so their companies gets about the same percentage of the funding. WHAT A SURPRISE...

And don't tell me somebody in western countries is forbidding women to create their own businesses or denying funding for good businesses, because it was woman's idea...

Re:It's time to stop gender BS

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what happens when you let SJWs take over a site. Everything they touch turns to shit.

Re:It's time to stop gender BS

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, a poor snowflake has been triggered. /s

Can we get some non-political submissions today?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we please get some good submissions on the front page today?

This one is pretty much just political, meant to agitate leftists and get them to post a lot of angry comments about "sexism".

The one before this one was about transsexuals in the US military. Again, it was meant to agitate leftists and get them to post a lot of angry comments about "transphobia".

The one before that one was about Americans avoiding vaccines. Yet again, it was meant to agitate leftists and get them to post a lot of angry comments about "anti-vaxxers".

I know, I know. Some will claim it's done to generate controversy, which generates page loads, which generates ad views. That argument never made sense to me, as most of us here are probably smart enough to block ads outright, or if some embedded ones do slip through, we just ignore them.

Can we have relevant articles on the front page, please? Ones having to do with science, technology, math, computing, electronics, and stuff like that which we can't get from other news sources?

Can we not be subjected to these petty identity politics? If we wanted to argue about "sexism" or "transphobia" or "anti-vaxxers" we could just go to a site like Huffington Post or Reddit.

There are lots of good Firehose submissions about truly interesting topics that don't involve -isms or -phobias or identity politics. Editors, let's get some of those on the Slashdot front page, ok?

We come here to discuss open source software, programming languages, Linux, tinkering with electronics, and to learn about new scientific discoveries. We don't come here for leftist identity politics.

Fully strange...

[Mashiki]

The opposite should be true. After all, the "woman are wonderful effect" is very well known. Both men and woman have an unconscious pro-bias towards woman as well. Ranging from social to material interests. But you can look all over society and find cases where this isn't true because of the problems it brings.

And those problems? You can thank false allegations, socjus, fake sexual harassment, cases like this or Ellen Pao and the ability of a woman to destroy your career and life over a false claim. I'll bet that nearly every person that reads this comment and is currently working in a corporate environment of some kind has seen the shift where men leave doors open, or have one or more individuals in the same room with them when talking to a woman. There's a reason for it.

And it's to the point where that even if proven false in the court of law that a man's choices are commit suicide or try to work through it, by picking up and moving to another part of the world to try and start over. It's not worth the trouble, and this is a result of people trying to limit and protect themselves from a potential fallout. I'm sure someone is going to bring up a "but it really doesn't destroy them..." No? Find anyone who's been the subject of a false claim, and you'll find a person who's lost friends, family, career, connections, and are ostracized even when innocent, the person recanted, or was dismissed by the courts with prejudice against the accuser.

Re:Fully strange...

[Anonymous Coward]

The opposite should be true. After all, the "woman are wonderful effect" is very well known.

Well, that's the problem. It's much more awkward when your company heads include a woman for the venture capitalists to argue for visiting a house with wonderfully effective women.

Re:Fully strange...

[Mashiki]

Damn son, put the tinfoil hat down. Women aren't some scary alien thing. Just act like a decent human and you're good.

Don't be an idiot kid. Take a look in the US for example with the title ix complaint system at universities if you want an example in action. Two people hook up, woman decides that she's changed her mind, was pressured by friends to recant because of social status, made a false rape claim for various reasons(like trying to get another person to like her), or she rapes him, or he has proof of such and she's lying. And you'll find those male students thrown out, rail roaded, crucified in the court of public opinion and some go right down that dark path of killing themselves because they see no way out because their entire life is ruined in their early 20's. That's it. There is zero accountability in that system.

Let's look at policing. You're taught to always believe the woman in a case of rape or sexual assault. If it turns out to be false? Charges are almost never laid, because there's the belief that it would stop victims from coming forward. It's only in the very rare cases where a woman has made multiple false claims, is she charged. You can have a case where the accuser is outright lying and the police will not lay a charge.

Didn't the UVA false rape claim teach you anything? Or the several dozen other cases that made the news in the last year? That when someone, anyone has the ability to make a serious claim and bare false witness without repercussions they will. Even ancient Mesopotamia figured that one out.

Re:Fully strange...

[bigman2003]

No...that poster was dead on.

About 3.5 years ago, when this wave of feminism was kicking off, I had a good friend who was a woman.

She and some of her comrades in arms decided to circle the wagons around feminism, and I was one of the victims.

Victim in the sense that they lodged a complaint against me. BUT- it was unfounded, and that was the outcome of all investigations.

Do you know how little good that did me? The fact that I didn't harass, but they 'felt as though they were being harassed' was all it took. Exactly as the poster said, lost my job, my friends, etc.

Why? Because I am part of the patriarchy, and they want to smash that...and it doesn't matter who gets in the way. Because here's the plan...men don't matter. We are less. Damaging a few men to get what you want is like stepping on ants. (Read the byline on the website that is linked.)

Women are not the problem by themselves. The problem is that we throw so much sympathy at them, that we don't pay attention to the facts. And this article that we are commenting on is a really good example of that. Some jackass out there is going to take this at face value, and start an affirmative action campaign to 'correct' the situation.

I hate working with women now. I view each of them as a time-bomb that will go off, pretty much independent of my own actions. It's happened before, it will probably happen again.

Will I actively work against them? Nope. But I will never again get into that trap...and now overall productivity is way down, because I spend my time avoiding getting on the wrong side of someone who one day will wake up, get a pixie cut, and decide that men are her problem- not the fact that she just hates her job like the rest of us.

The guy you responded to is experienced. And more and more men are gaining this experience of women using the laws/sympathy to get what they want.

To the ladies who don't do this. Sorry..but that's the way it goes. Same way you won't meet me in a dark parking lot. I am not a rapist, but you need to be careful- I understand that- so you act as though I might be a rapist. Sure, you are not the type to lodge a bullshit complaint, but I need to be wary, because the other women don't identify themselves ahead of time. So you all get tagged with the, "She will file a complaint against you" label.

Yay for women in tech...

Re:Fully strange...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you build a system that can be abused, there are people that will abuse it. Sexual harassment or coercion almost always happens when witnesses are not present, and rarely leaves physical evidence, so it becomes a case of he said/she said. This can't satisfy the "beyond a reasonable doubt" test, so the lawmakers have seen fit to make sexual crimes a exception allowing a woman's testimony alone to be enough to convict a person (vast majority being men). It was therefore inevitable that some women would sieze upon this to use such allegations as a weapon. Unfortunately this also has the effect of making it even harder for true victims to come forward and have their abusers held accountable. That is part of why society tries to compensate by punishing those it thinks are guilty even though a court doesn't legally reach such a conclusion, which just adds to the power of those who make false accusations.

Re:Fully strange...

[CrybabiesArePeople]

Boo hoo hoo!

Re:Fully strange...

[TimMD909]

Sorry to hear about your experiences. Sadly, I'm not surprised.

At a previous job, there was a young girl at the front desk as a glorified receptionist. On a few occasions, she would complain about her job and her low salary. I asked her what does she want to do with her life? She had no concrete career goals and little to no training or valuable skills in any field.

I still can't understand why she would expect to earn anything close to everyone else in the office. Everyone else had years of programming experience, including the managers. If I worked in a doctor's office and had no medical training, I wouldn't expect to earn much. A receptionist is easily replaceable and doesn't have any rare or valuable skills. Doesn't matter how much people are making around me, I wouldn't be worth much. Why couldn't she understand that?

Yet there she was, complaining about unfair treatment. She wanted more money but had no way to make the company more money. That's the sort of entitlement that I'm getting sick of...

Re:Fully strange...

[CrybabiesArePeople]

You think that men aren't capable of bullying, harassment, pissing contests, aggressive behavior...? Do you realize that you sound like "a short bald guy (or jew, arab, white...) kicked me in the nuts today. Ergo, I know avoid all short bald guys and think that they are a nuisance."

Re:Fully strange...

[Anonymous Coward]

bullying, harassment, pissing contests, aggressive behavior

Those are valuable evolutionary tools provided by nature. These abilities allow nature to limit inferior organisms like "short bald guy" and "fat ugly girl" from becoming too common, which is objectively desirable.

Re:Fully strange...

[bigman2003]

If there were laws and policies in place that specifically protected those individuals, I would feel the same way.

I work at a University. Title IX is real, and everything that goes with it. If you don't think that women as a protected class (yes, literally, yes, factually) is not an issue, then you have no idea what goes on at Universities.

Yes, men are capable of all kinds of stupid shit. But men don't have the ability to end an interpersonal problem with, "She was harassing/intimidating me". Because men are not a protected class.

So it doesn't really matter how I sound to you. What matters is that the policies in place, and SERIOUSLY enforced, go one direction on this subject.

Do you understand this? Do you take the training each year that reinforces this exact position?

Thanks for your input though. It points out the fact that many people do NOT understand the situation as it is. As it is written in law, and policy. You should read up on it.

If you think that corporate jobs are unfair to women, just wait until these same laws and policies apply to the private sector. If you think it's no big deal, you have no idea how these things are written.

Re:Fully strange...

[Anonymous Coward]

She wanted more money but had no way to make the company more money. That's the sort of entitlement that I'm getting sick of...

Don't underestimate the kind of business effect a professional good-looking receptionist can make. If she's a stunner with her head screwed on right, a man cannot compete.

Re:Fully strange...

[CrybabiesArePeople]

Thank you, clearly you know more about the subject than I do. I guess you wished you didn't have to know that much. I guess it depends of the point of view. In the instances and environment you are describing yes, women/minorities are probably "advantaged" over white males. You had to suffer from that and that's a shame. In society as a whole (in US/Europe, let's not talk about saudi arabia or similar...) my opinion/feeling is that minorities/women have a harder time than white men. Facts backing up this? women make less money for the same job usually, a lot of women do not report rapes because judgement for police/society, having to "prove"the rape...(hence policies that may go too far in the opposite as you have experienced) ...Crack possession with much harsher sentences than cocaine...Lead pipes in Flint...Toys for girls only in pink... the list could go on. I guess each one could be debated, rebuked with specific examples...politics/society usually isn't made of binary propositions. You experienced the philosophical problem with affirmative action-type policies: To enable greater justice in society as a whole, should we allow injustices at the individual level...In the end life isn't always easy, sometimes we eat sh!t from society, whatever color/gender we are.

Re:Fully strange...

[CrybabiesArePeople]

BTW I haven't read all of it but you may relate to some posts here: http://www.scottaaronson.com/b...

Re:Fully strange...

[kelanos]

serious question, how are you not itching to take up arms and fight back against this insanity? clearly our whole civilization needs the blood of these mental defectives flowing like rapids

Re: Fully strange...

[CrybabiesArePeople]

Personally I have encountered male whiners too. Whiners will always find a way to justify their whining. You even can find some that will whine because theyâ(TM)re women and itâ(TM)s difficult in our society being a woman...and some that will whine because theyâ(TM)re white men and our society is treating them with disrespect...

Re:Fully strange...

[diabolo-nerd]

For every false claim there are 10-20 or more true claims that are dismissed by saying "she was asking for it", or never reported because of the backlash that female accusers receive. False claims do happen, and are often not handled well, but they are tiny noise in the massive cacophony of women who are harassed and assaulted. If men are truly scared of hiring or getting professionally involved with women because they are worried about being accused of harassment, it sounds to me like they need to look at their own behavior.

Now thats gonna hard to control

[Sla$hPot]

How about government fonding startups with girls? That would be a fun thing

Re:Now thats gonna hard to control

[__aaclcg7560]

The word, "fonding", is, "The act of looking at someone with such care that you radiate your love for them by simply staring at them."

The IRS does that job quite well. No need to create another layer of bureaucracy.

Re: Now thats gonna hard to control

[Anonymous Coward]

Yay a typo. Quick let's get our torches and pitchforks!
Seriously you know what he/she meant.

Re: Now thats gonna hard to control

[__aaclcg7560]

Seriously you know what he/she meant.

If I did, I wouldn't be looking it up. :P

Re:Now thats gonna hard to control

[Anonymous Coward]

I wake up this morning, and I see creimer talking shit about someone else's bad spelling.

I'm not sure if it's opposite day, or if I've had a stroke, but either way, that's some seriously mind-warping hilarity to see Slashdot's resident buffoon and world-renowned English abuser ragging on someone else for their poor spelling.

(... He said askance.)

Re:Now thats gonna hard to control

[__aaclcg7560]

I wake up this morning, and I see creimer talking shit about someone else's bad spelling.

Have some Hot & Spicy Spam with your whine.

Re:Now thats gonna hard to control

[Anonymous Coward]

I woke up screaming from a nightmare about creimer taking a shit. Ten pounds of shit.

Re:Now thats gonna hard to control

[Anonymous Coward]

My nightmare is being reincarnated as creimer's toilet.

Take the Remington Steele approach...

[__aaclcg7560]

This isn't an unheard of problem. The 1980's TV series, Remington Steele, explained the situation in the intro for each episode: Laura Holt (Stephanie Zimbalist) opens a private investigation agency, gets no business as a woman, and renames the agency with a fictional male owner who is always unavailable. Until a jewel thief steps into the role (Pierce Bronsan), but that's a different problem.

Re:Take the Remington Steele approach...

[Anonymous Coward]

Or JK Rowling, George Eliot, and other writers of fiction

Re:Take the Remington Steele approach...

[__aaclcg7560]

Or JK Rowling, George Eliot, and other writers of fiction

I've done the opposite with my gender-neutral pen name, C.D. Reimer, writing short stories with lead female characters, and submitting them to anthologies edited by female editors. I've gotten quite a few first serial sales that way. Mostly because writers, including female writers, tend to write short stories with a lead male character. A short story with a lead female character stands out from the crowd.

Re:Take the Remington Steele approach...

[Anonymous Coward]

You should have gone species-neutral instead.

"A short story with a lead female character stands out from the crowd."

Especially poorly-written, unedited, stream-of-consciousness gibberish, with 2/5 ratings.

https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/4171001.C_D_Reimer

I really like the gender-neutral bearded fat man picture. I also like the "pen name" which is pretty much your legal name. That's a bold choice, jigglehips.

Re:Take the Remington Steele approach...

[TheFakeTimCook]

Or JK Rowling, George Eliot, and other writers of fiction

I've done the opposite with my gender-neutral pen name, C.D. Reimer, writing short stories with lead female characters, and submitting them to anthologies edited by female editors. I've gotten quite a few first serial sales that way. Mostly because writers, including female writers, tend to write short stories with a lead male character. A short story with a lead female character stands out from the crowd.

Nice example of Zen Marketing! Kudos!

Re:Take the Remington Steele approach...

[__aaclcg7560]

https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/4171001.C_D_Reimer

I haven't looked at that profile since Good Reads got bought by Amazon. Something else for my to do list.

I really like the gender-neutral bearded fat man picture.

Without a beard I look like a woman. After a few odd conversations on Twitter, I always post my picture with a beard.

Re:Take the Remington Steele approach...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes you're just like D C Fontana!

There's nothing quite like a fat male virgin writing female characters.

Re:Take the Remington Steele approach...

[Anonymous Coward]

"I haven't looked at that profile since Good Reads got bought by Amazon"

From creimer-ese to reality: "Another one of my revenue streams dried up completely, I forgot about it."

"Without a beard I look like a woman. "

https://media.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/shrinknp_200_200/p/6/005/074/0a0/3d4db3b.jpg

Another creimer lie....

Re:Take the Remington Steele approach...

[__aaclcg7560]

"Another one of my revenue streams dried up completely, I forgot about it."

Good Reads has never been a revenue stream.

Another creimer lie....

Zoom in on my face without showing any hair. Male, female or can't tell?

Re:Take the Remington Steele approach...

[Anonymous Coward]

Zoom in on my face without showing any hair. Male, female or can't tell?

Well, you've got the bitch tits of a woman. And your face lacks any discernible planes or edges, resembling nothing more than a fat, shapeless amoeba. Given these lack of obvious visual cues that would tell us whether you're male or female, I'm going to have to go with "can't tell, looks like a shapeless blob to me."

But in no way would I look at you and say, "Oh hey, there's a fat chick."

Re:Take the Remington Steele approach...

[Anonymous Coward]

Zen, as in "If there's no one there to read them, are they really ebooks?"

Like that?

Re:Take the Remington Steele approach...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Good Reads has never been a revenue stream."

Oh, that was your purely artistic outlet, for the benefit of the masses and posterity? You're a real humanitarian.

"Male, female or can't tell?"

To me, you look like a Barbapapa. Except everyone liked Barbapapa. You are Barbaloser, the Barbapapa that even Calimero found depressing to be around.

You actually look like a middle-aged, post-andropausal low-testosterone unhealthy obese man.

Re:Take the Remington Steele approach...

[Anonymous Coward]

My guess is that even if s/he were naked in the picture one couldn't tell the gender or sex except by facial hair -- whatever little there is downstairs would be covered by so many rolls of fat that one couldn't tell what it was. So, I think s/he has a point -- without the facial hair, it's ambiguous and all one could conclude is that it's likely human but is either an extremely ugly extremely fat female or an ugly extremely fat male.

Re:Take the Remington Steele approach...

[TimMD909]

I love when people use fictional stories as support of their argument. Then I can do this:

You know another problem that's not unheard of? Velociraptors hunting down humans.

This is incorrect

[Anonymous Coward]

And is complete scaremongering. Without a woman on your team, your product runs the risk of being attacked by hate groups.

Sorry for trolling

[Sla$hPot]

But can we have some stories about sex toy design funding? Im sure someone can find a couple of success stories worth mentioning. Ggggs it must be vacation time at SlashDot

I'm not surprised

[rsilvergun]

I hate to say it, but even with all things being equal you still have to worry about your owner having a kid. Men work harder when their wives get pregnant, woman take time off.

Re:I'm not surprised

[JohnFen]

Men work harder when their wives get pregnant, woman take time off.

Unsupported broadbrushing. Some men may work harder, sure, but I doubt if it's most. New parents, male and female, tend to be pretty exhausted. And lots of men take time off when the baby first comes home.

Re:I'm not surprised

[TheFakeTimCook]

I hate to say it, but even with all things being equal you still have to worry about your owner having a kid. Men work harder when their wives get pregnant, woman take time off.

You'd take time off, too, if you spent nine months carrying a bowling-ball strapped to your abdomen.

Re:I'm not surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, but biology didn't work out that way. So in the end, women take more time off than men and that's reflected in the value of their future work. There's nothing any more improper about that than insurance companies charging male drivers more because they crash more.

Re:I'm not surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

Men work harder when their wives get pregnant, woman take time off.

Unsupported broadbrushing. Some men may work harder, sure, but I doubt if it's most. New parents, male and female, tend to be pretty exhausted. And lots of men take time off when the baby first comes home.

Millennials are the first generation which hasn't fully internalized the "mom is tehre for the kids, dad is away making money for the kids" double standard of "putting family first".

So, VC's over 30 will probably interpret a woman on the team as in increased risk of ditching the company to be with her kids even if the woman in question is the bread winner and it'll be dad who stays home outside the couple weeks to actually birth the baby and recover.

Re:I'm not surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd take time off, too, if you spent nine months carrying a bowling-ball strapped to your abdomen.

Reality check: a whole lot of male board members spend decades carrying a bowling-ball and larger strapped to their abdomen without taking time off for it.

More proof VC funders are clueless

[Anonymous Coward]

VC Funders are just idiots who happen to have money. They are nothing but uninformed morons waiting to be fooled.

Re:More proof VC funders are clueless

[DNS-and-BIND]

This is why a fair system, where the government decides which companies are funded, is needed. In fact, why have a middleman, just have the government deal out the money directly. It'll work much better than the idiot VC system, that's for sure.

Could be worse

[Anonymous Coward]

If you had creimer on your team, no VC would show up in the first place!

Re:Could be worse

[__aaclcg7560]

If you had creimer on your team, no VC would show up in the first place!

Have some Spam-flavored Macadamia Nuts with your whine.

Re:Could be worse

[Anonymous Coward]

have some Romanian fish sex

Re:Could be worse

[Anonymous Coward]

you sound butthurt, bro

Re:Could be worse

[Anonymous Coward]

your butthole feels so snug, sis

Risk Taking

[dcw3]

I'm sure someone will jump on this as sexist, but women don't take as much risk as men. Why that is, is up for discussion, but until it's fixed, it makes sense for VCs to take less risk with them. There's plenty written on the topic, here's a sample.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/a...

Color people

[Anonymous Coward]

Do a study on VC funding for people of color, I dare you.

Re: Color people

[Anonymous Coward]

Like the Asians and Indians who make up close to 65% of the executives and workforce of typical SV companies, despite being a much smaller fraction of the overall American population?

Re: this should come as;

[Anonymous Coward]

Your comment is incomprehensible. Can you try restating it in an understandable manner?

Re:Oh no

[dcw3]

Right, because there are no difference between men and women. In all seriousness, see my other post on risk taking.

Did they look at other side?

[Anonymous Coward]

How many VC have female on the team?

Almost impossible?

[ScentCone]

So, teams with women getting funding 25% percent as often as male-only, and the author calls those chances of getting funding almost impossible?

Re:Can we get some non-political submissions today

[dcw3]

Mod this AC up.

Bullshit website

[Bender Unit 22]

I looked at the other "articles" from that website.
It has golden nuggets like this " For as long as America has existed, its criminal justice system has maintained the supremacy of white people. "
I must admit that I choose to skip the "placenta osso buco" article.

Why do you keep linking to garbage sites like that, what the fuck is wrong with you?

Re: Oh no

[Anonymous Coward]

Do those differences work out to

VC money is poison

[JohnFen]

It should be avoided anyway.

Re:VC money is poison

[Anonymous Coward]

Nicely said.

What am I misinterpreting?

[hyades1]

From the summary:"We did not determine any significant performance differences between companies with women CEOs from companies with men CEOs, so it is quite surprising that women are still, practically speaking, shut out of the market for venture capital funding, both as CEOs and participants of executive teams."

So presumably, there is a much harsher filtration system in place for women, both as CEOs and as successful funding recipients. Only the astoundingly good ones would even have a slim chance of getting money or a top job.

Yet there is no measurable performance difference.

I would have thought that if only women who are so extraordinary it is impossible to overlook them are getting money and/or becoming corporate CEOs, their performance would far outstrip that of their comparatively less gifted male counterparts.

Re:What am I misinterpreting?

[Anonymous Coward]

The authors want you to believe that venture capitalists are out to lose money by refusing to invest in companies with women in management even though they would pay equal returns. Let that sink in for a minute.

Re:What am I misinterpreting?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would disagree with the performance difference. The companies with women CEOs that I know of have mostly failed, or have lost extreme amounts of value since having women CEOs. I don't think that statement can be correct.

Re:What am I misinterpreting?

[Anonymous Coward]

Glass floor.

Look at the Study

[SmaryJerry]

People are already talking about correlation etc, but the study tells a different story than the slashdot summary. The study shows that companies with woman on the executive team were 15% of all companies in the sample (Table 1 and 2). It also shows that companies with woman on the executive team made 25% of total funding dollars across all industries (Table 5). It also shows that companies with woman on the executive team received an average valuation of $73 million those without woman received only $49 million (Table 8). In fact the only fact supporting the summary was that companies with woman as CEOs received a valuation of $40 million investment versus male CEOs who had $54 million on average. It is important to note there were only 119 companies with woman as CEOs while there were 3554 with males CEOs, a much larger sample. Obviously each individual company with a woman CEO effects the average valuation greater for their sex and you can decide for yourself if that makes the number less relevant or a good measure.

Theranos, Yahoo, HP

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at the sordid history of these giants with regard to the periods of time when A feminine perspective was put in place..
I have noting against women, and the stuff around it..
But lets talk apples to apples..

And the fault lies with women

[Anonymous Coward]

You wanted in... we let you in.
You wanted more... we gave you more.
You wanted us gone... we drew a line.
----------------------
You don't control shit you dumb bitch.
Men run this world and we allow you to exist.
Our violent ways are the bedrock on which the fragile notion of civilisation exists.
All your feminist crap is just a tiny delicate bubble
that we permit you to enjoy, until it metastasises and we have it removed.

Now pack your flowerprint bags and GTFO

Re:And the fault lies with women

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah sure buddy. Admit it. You are gay.

Re:And the fault lies with women

[Zontar The Mindless]

Bet your wife doesn't know you posted that.

No difference in performance

[Anonymous Coward]

HP, Yahoo, Reddit, IBM, ...

Re:No difference in performance

[Zontar The Mindless]

...Oracle...

Oh, wait a minute...

Re:Can we get some non-political submissions today

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's time to leave /. but where to go instead? Most other tech sites are pushing their political agenda hard, part of the partisan politics I think. Any suggestions? All I have is Ycombinator, that has a decent news section.

if you want to whine about something

[Anonymous Coward]

First stop stuff happening like this, anywhere in the world

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/world/pakistan-police-arrest-village-council-for-ordering-rape-9066906

captcha: nuptial (OMG)

Re:Can we get some non-political submissions today

[TechyImmigrant]

Let's talk about Drupal instead. Oh wait..

Moral courage

[shaksys]

I wonder if a VC wanted to give out 20 million dollars, someone would deny the investment because that particular VC acts on data that says he shouldn't invest in women.

Ah, the Invisible Hand

[Anonymous Coward]

...and its buddy, the Shrugging Atlas. I'm sure they'll get that fixed in no time!

Re:Can we get some non-political submissions today

[Anonymous Coward]

Huzzah

How about a weather forecast?

[Anonymous Coward]

That should be non-political.

The 5-day forecast for Alderaan is .. oh wait, too political.

It's a well-known, well-documented fact

[kelanos]

It's a well-known, well-documented fact

which is why you couldn't provide any references I guess

Just because venture capital doesn't fund women, if that's even true, doesn't mean women have an 'uphill battle'.
The truth is, with all these stories about 'evil men LITERALLY raping innocent women' that having a woman on your team is a liability, because she can be gotten to and turned to sabotage your company.

And another thing about why women may have such a difficult 'uphill battle': Maybe they just aren't as good as men. The question that no one will ask is the obvious answer to all of this mess. Given human history for all time, this is an obvious fact. Women are subjectively minded, men are objectively minded. Objective is better. Period.

BUT HOW WILL I GET THE PUSSY IF I DON'T SAY WOMEN ARE EQUAL

the entire driving force behind this insane pseudo-egalitarian charade

faith based

[ma1wrbu5tr]

Venture Capital investing is faith based. (no, not religious) There are many factors that can come into play when you're giving your money to someone and hoping for a ROI. I highly doubt that the sex of the person seeking the capital is one of them. Good ideas are not enough. A plan for execution is more important than the idea itself and VC investors know that. Because no two ventures are the same, there is no baseline from which to jump to the conclusion that the study suggests. Maybe the options where women were involved had a weak plan or a half-baked one. The fact that this study was looking at sex as a factor speaks to the SJW leanings of the study itself more than actual facts that investors care about. Why is this even on /.?

"well-known, well-documented"

[Anonymous Coward]

Any report that starts with "It's a well-known, well-documented fact that women..." is bound to be pure bullshit, and nothing more than propaganda.

No. MOST likely it's a bullshit study.

[denzacar]

Cause it is.
Biased, post hoc ergo propter hoc nonsense.

They didn't do a comparison of probability for a company to get VC funding based on the presence of women.
They didn't compare companies which received VC funding vs. those that didn't.
They just took all the VC funded companies and counted ones with women listed on the company profile.

It's a literal post hoc condition for determination of likelihood of receiving VC funding.

As for bias... From the study:

The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) reports that in 2013 approximately 13% of the working population of the United States was in the process of starting or running a new business - the rate for women was 11% compared with 16% for men (Kelley, Brush, Greene, and Y. Litovsky 2013 Kelley, D., C. Brush, P. Greene, and Y. Litovsky. 2013.
The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Women's Report. Wellesley, MA: Babson College. [Google Scholar]). This means that one out of every 10 women in the United States was becoming an entrepreneur, which is a higher rate of female entrepreneurship than for any of the other 24 developed economies.

Disregarding the fact that they are confusing "one out of every 10 women in the United States" with 11% OF the 13% OF the working population... in the process of starting or running a NEW business.
People who write biased crap can't do math. Big surprise there.

But their criteria for VC funding female teams is "a single female on the team".
In other words, their sample will look a LOT like that 11% mentioned in the cited study, as it doesn't discriminate between the teams with a single woman, teams with more women or teams with one or more women starting or running a business which is not new, but only seeking VC funding for the first time.
Cause they are going out of their way to find a proof of "women being bad luck on the ship".

Number of VC funded companies, according to the study, with at least one women on the company profile in that same year (2013)? 18%.
2012 - 13%.
2011 - 9%

I.e. Percentage of companies with women on the team receiving VC funding is actually higher than the percentage of women in the process of starting or running a new business.
It's even higher than the percentage of ALL population starting or running a new business.

Only thing they got right is that there are MORE COMPANIES WITH WOMEN.
But that's not the idea they want to get behind.
See... there's this patriarchy thing...

Re:No. MOST likely it's a bullshit study.

[AmiMoJo]

They just took all the VC funded companies and counted ones with women listed on the company profile.

It's a literal post hoc condition for determination of likelihood of receiving VC funding.

The actual study doesn't make the claim in those terms. It looks at the amount of VC funding received. Maybe TFA doesn't report it well, but that's not the fault of the study.

Any it couldn't really be any other way, because I doubt anyone keeps stats on the number of companies that pitch and get nothing. That doesn't mean that the conclusions they draw are invalid automatically.

Disregarding the fact that they are confusing "one out of every 10 women in the United States" with 11% OF the 13% OF the working population... in the process of starting or running a NEW business.

You misread it. They are saying that 13% of the working population is involved in starting or running a new business. That includes all employees working for such businesses in any role. 13% is the number for both genders. If you split i by gender, it's 11% of working women and 16% of working men.

Admittedly, it was phrased badly. It's actually "one out of every 10 working women in the United States."

Re:No. MOST likely it's a bullshit study.

[Anonymous Coward]

A biased individual who disagrees with the study's results wants us to disregard said study because it's biased. Stay classy, hater.

Re:No. MOST likely it's a bullshit study.

[denzacar]

The actual study doesn't make the claim in those terms.

Except it does. Right there in the conclusion.

However, there is still a significant gender gap, in that all-men teams are four times more likely to receive funding from venture capital investors than companies with even one woman on the team.

It's pushing the idea of "women are bad luck for VC investments". By describing it as a probability.
WHICH IT IS NOT!

Probability for the companies in the study to receive VC funding is 100%. They've ALL received VC funding.
Regardless of their being women, Chinese or little green men on the team.
You can't do conditional probability for A happening when the condition is that A has already happened. That's a loop.
It's not "You're not poor BECAUSE you have money". It's "You're not poor BECAUSE you're not poor".
They are trying to find probability for a tautology.

What they did is the equivalent of taking a sample of Olympic gold medalists, counted all the women and compared them to the number of men who've won a gold medal.
Then, they explained that as the chance for a woman to win gold at the Olympics.
They don't know how to set up a hypothesis properly.

They THINK they are setting up conditions for proving that presence of women influences the likelihood of getting VC funding.
But due to their bias, and clear lack of understanding of elementary school math, they've missed the fact that they've set up conditions where no percentage of women OR men can't change the likelihood of getting VC funding.
Cause they've aggressively selected ONLY for companies who DID get VC funding.
No amount of fine tuning of "female" variable after the fact will change that.
Cause they've set up the conditions in such a way that the probability they are seeking is already 100%.

What they SHOULD have done is run a comparison of companies with and without women who DID get VC funding - to companies (with and without women) who pursued VC funding but didn't get any.
Aaah... but for that they need to gather their own data.
Not just mine already available databases.

Any it couldn't really be any other way, because I doubt anyone keeps stats on the number of companies that pitch and get nothing.

See above.
Also, under "Doing one's own FUCKING research".
Also, under "What happens when database I'm querying doesn't have the data I'm looking for?"

That doesn't mean that the conclusions they draw are invalid automatically.

Yes! YES IT DOES MEAN THAT!
CAUSE THE FUCKING DATA THEY'D NEED IN ORDER FOR THEIR CONCLUSIONS TO BE BASED ON FACTS IS SIMPLY NOT THERE!!!

You just said it yourself!
"I doubt anyone keeps stats on the number of companies that pitch and get nothing"

When you don't have data you need you can't just make up shit from the bits you have or would like to have.
Unless you're Donald Trump. Or a lying orange lunatic cunt. But I'm repeating myself.

You misread it. They are saying that 13% of the working population is involved in starting or running a new business. That includes all employees working for such businesses in any role. 13% is the number for both genders. If you split i by gender, it's 11% of working women and 16% of working men.

Admittedly, it was phrased badly. It's actually "one out of every 10 working women in the United States."

No.
I didn't misread it. THEY misunderstood (or misrepresented) the math.
That "Admittedly, it was phrased badly." bit... That's not "phrased badly". That's called "INCORRECT MATH".
Or "fake numbers", if you prefer the parlance of the times.

Also... YOU are the one misreading and/or willfully misunderstanding what's written. Sorry.
It's NOT "one out of every 10 working women in the United States."

It's "40.74% of all NEW entrepreneurs in 2013. Which,

Re:No. MOST likely it's a bullshit study.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for your uninformed misunderstanding of the situation.

Re:No. MOST likely it's a bullshit study.

[Anonymous Coward]

Treated.

They're called Vulture Capitalists for a reason

[Anonymous Coward]

They'll suck you dry and then pick at your bones to make sure you're dead. They want their money back times 1,000 percent.

You're better off getting a business loan from friends or a bank.

Re:They're called Vulture Capitalists for a reason

[Anonymous Coward]

You're better off making ends meet until you're profitable. You don't need VC money... It gives you a false sense of worth as a profitable company.

Re:Can we get some non-political submissions today

[Anonymous Coward]

So what you're saying is that you're a sexist, transphobic, anti-vaxxer right-winger and you're triggered by people threatening your conception of reality?

Ex ante, idiot!

[aglider]

Not ex post!
How can you be so stupid?

TV series are FICTION.

[Anonymous Coward]

TV series are FICTION.

The images from the TV do not have to be real.

women suck at interviews

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, we know women suck at interviews.

http://recruitingtimes.org/recruitment-and-hr-features/13306/report-shows-women-suck-interviews-fear-rejection/

So we may have to blame the wimminz after all.

What are the stats for how female VCs fund co's?

[presidenteloco]

Oh wait, first, what is the percentage of VCs that are female, and roughly, why is that?

Not suggesting female VCs would or should decide differently.

Frankly, using gender of the proponent as a criterion is just f'ing dumb.
It should be about drive, dogged determination, intelligence, team synergy, idea quality, progress so far, roadmap credibility...

Boob Arithmetic

[Anonymous Coward]

The study fails to acknowledge that VC funded boards of directors are made up of boobs. If you add a women, that's two more boobs. So in reaching a quorum a women's vote outweighs a man's vote. Thus, to be fair to the male boobs fewer women are added to the team.

This is textbook stuff...

well, duh

[Anonymous Coward]

that's because women are incompetent at anything they do

Yes but Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are they 4 times less likely to get funding. Statistics are great but without answering Why this article is almost useless.

Extremely anti women article.

[FeelGood314]

The article is clearly misleading and hurts women. If I'm a VC I look at two things in a company. Is the company a good investment and will others think it is a good investment. If the company is above very good, is going to take 10 years to turn a profit but I think others will perceive it as nearly worthless then I won't invest in it because I have no way to get my money out and I also fear that I might end up being the only one bank rolling the company, tying up my money for a decade.

Does stupidity count as a defense for hate crimes?

Just one woman to blame

[Anonymous Coward]

Elizabeth Holmes... She ruined any trust at all..

Re:Can we get some non-political submissions today

[Anonymous Coward]

https://soylentnews.org/

Makes sense

[sproketboy]

Women work less.

Re:Can we get some non-political submissions today

[AmiMoJo]

Those stories always get the most comments. That suggests that people like commenting on them.

If you want them to stop, stop commenting.

There's a very good reason for that

[Anonymous Coward]

Women don't make decisions based on clear cut, black and white gain. They make decisions based on emotion and impact on people. The former is what the VC wants, the latter is the opposite of what they want.

Re:Can we get some non-political submissions today

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we have relevant articles on the front page, please? Ones having to do with science, technology, math, computing, electronics, and stuff like that which we can't get from other news sources?

The next article will be how some guys made a ranking of programming languages by their Google counts or lines of code on Github or a dowsing rod or somesuch...

CAPTCHA: interest

Re:Can we get some non-political submissions today

[Anonymous Coward]

Soylent News is not the answer. I have found it to be worse than Slashdot in many ways. Here are some of the problems I think it suffers from:

It sometimes reports on stories well after even Slashdot does, and Slashdot isn't known for being quick to report news.

Many of the submissions there end up being the same as, or very similar to, the ones here at Slashdot, too.

It also has a very small community, so you don't get a wide range of people contributing to the discussion.

The small community that does exist is rather left-leaning, so it's not much different than Slashdot. I'd even say it's closer to Reddit than it is to Slashdot, from a political perspective.

The moderation system only makes these problems worse. Since the site has a small community, it's always the same small group of leftists who get mod points. So I think they generally mod up pro-leftist comments, and mod down any comment that isn't leftist. This means that other viewpoints are suppressed, and this drives away a lot of good contributors and commenters who aren't leftists.

Remember, that site originally arose during the Dice-era Slashdot Beta nonsense. Once Slashdot Beta was ended, and the site sold, Soylent News lost its reason to exist. What we see there now is just the decaying remnants of a now-irrelevant movement.

Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes

[kamaaina]

So is the Theranos case an outlier or is it because of Theranos VC do not want to fund when a woman is involved.

Re:Can we get some non-political submissions today

[Anonymous Coward]

You think slashdot is left leaning? Aside from flamebait articles like this constantly getting published, I'd say the user base leans right.

Re:Can we get some non-political submissions today

[Anonymous Coward]

You only post on these articles. Even if the majority stop (and they have) your post count alone will ensure gender politics articles get double-digit comment counts.

re: viewing people as numbers

[King_TJ]

I don't have lots of experience working with venture capitalists. But I do have a buddy who has run a successful VC firm for years, focusing on funding projects related to education.

I suspect in the "big picture" of any new business venture (of any type) asking for funding, or even in the tech sector, there could be a statistical reality that the projects with females in the group have been less likely to succeed. That could simply be because historically, females have tried to start new companies based on feelings/emotions; the sense that subjectively, "this new product idea is amazing because *I* love it and so does my circle of friends I shared it with". It could also be partially because they've caught on to the tactic of a group of guys trying to start a company adding a "token female" with a strategy of putting things under her name to get "female owned company" favors or tax breaks at a local level? They may realize that's not the ideal formula for long-term success.

Still, I would think the type of business being pitched has as much to do with it as anything. For example, a great product to aid in teaching young kids sounds like an area where a female-run company would be an asset. More women are doing the teaching to the really young kids than men are, so women are likely to be more in touch with a concept or product that appeals to them.

Now do the math

[Anonymous Coward]

Now do the math. The VC people do not have much to do with the team. Sexism is no advantage to them, they will not interact with the women very much anyway. But they want to winning team. And they found a criterion. It may fail (and will fail), but for the most cases it will be right. Else they would not do it, because they are very clever people. Else they would have VC for one project and that's it. But no, they know what project to choose next to get more and more money.

Commentary

[Anonymous Coward]

Are we going to delve deeper into this as far as the reasons for those decisions and what the VCs saw? I am interested. It's always fascinating to see the reasons for why people choose to invest or not invest, and can be highly instructive.

Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Not surprised that political activists can't do math. The other posts have already mentioned some of the frauds they are trying to perpetrate with numbers here.

But VCs can do math, arithmetic at least. And if indeed they are leaving money on the table by discounting teams with a female, you can bet that at least one of them would "get it" and clean up. It's the same as the salary gap discussion; if true, there's a fortune to be made just sitting there. Somebody, man, woman or algorithm will go for it.

The reason is obvious to me

[Qbertino]

The chance of romantic entanglement and drama within the lead team in a critical phase of the company that is to be invested in goes from 0 to "definitely existent" in a mixed team with a single woman. That tips the risk assessment straight out of into no-go territory.
I'd be curious about finding for all female teams. They'd probably have it a bit easier.

The benefits of living in a democracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell me again all about our vaunted democracy’s equality for all.

"It's a well-known, well-documented fact"

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what bad journalism looks like. And how chip-on-the-shoulder activists use language to try to create a premise in their minds that otherwise they would not have the arguments to support, by simply repeating this mantra that "everyone knows this to be true".

It's a well-known, well-documented fact that women entrepreneurs face an uphill battle in the fight to get funding for their businesses.

It is a well-known, well-documented fact that Laura June is a bad journalist with a chip on her shoulder. We will never know why Outline and Slashdot give her a platform to spread the neo-feminist agenda.

Re: this should come as;

[knope]

impossible