The Gendered (Lookist) Situation of Venture Capital

From Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge, here are excerpts of an article by Carmen Nobel about research co-authored by HBS’s Alison Wood Brooks. If you’re in search of startup funding, it pays to be a good-looking guy. A series of three studies reveals that investors prefer pitches from male entrepreneurs over those from female entrepreneurs, even when the content of the pitches is identical. Attractive men are the most persuasive pitchers of all, the studies show. The findings are detailed in the paper Investors Prefer Entrepreneurial Ventures Pitched by Attractive Men, published in the March 2014 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Our paper provides concrete proof that gender discrimination exists in the context of entrepreneurial pitching,” says Alison Wood Brooks, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School who coauthored the paper with Laura Huang . . . Sarah Wood Kearney . . . and Fiona E. Murray . . . . As a behavioral psychologist, Brooks studies the situational variables that influence personal persuasion. Kearney, her twin sister, is an entrepreneur and scholar whose research is fueled by both a frustration with and curiosity about the dearth of venture capital for women. (In the first half of 2013, companies with at least one female founder secured some 13 percent of total venture funding, up from 4 percent in 2004, according to data from PitchBook.) Murray is Kearney’s thesis adviser. Huang, whom B...
Source: The Situationist - Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: Tags: Implicit Associations Social Psychology Source Type: blogs