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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."
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
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.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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.