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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."

6 of 296 comments (clear)

  1. Not looking at pipeline by ranton · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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  2. Re:Correlation is not causation by KiloByte · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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  3. Misleading conclusion by Ty · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. Can we get some non-political submissions today? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:Correlation is not causation by AmiMoJo · · Score: 5, Informative

    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."

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  6. No. MOST likely it's a bullshit study. by denzacar · · Score: 5, Informative

    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...

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