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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."
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 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.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Om, nomnomnom...
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.
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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?
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.
Or maybe VC's know something about female-led businesses that the rest of us don't want to accept.
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?
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
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.
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.
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
God: "I don't leave footprints!"
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."
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC