Gender Gap in High-Growth Ventures: Evidence from a University Venture Mentoring Program

Abstract

We track high-growth ventures from the idea stage to commercialization and investigate the nature of the gender gap early in the venture lifecycle. Using data on 651 venture ideas that collectively attracted over $700 million in venture financing, we find a significant gender gap among ventures without documented intellectual assets at the earliest stage of founding but not among ventures that already possess intellectual assets. We also find a gender gap in entrepreneurs' readiness to commit to their venture ideas full-time. Conditional on such commitment, there are no significant differences in ventures' access to venture financing or rate of commercialization.

When does advice impact startup performance?

“…Some startup founders handle these challenges by hiring experienced managers (Kulchina, ) or entering incubator or accelerator programs (Cohen & Hochberg, ). Most founders, however, likely rely on their own trial and error or on informal advice from peers and mentors (Lerner & Malmendier, ; Nanda & Sørensen, ; Scott & Shu, ). Prior work has conceptualized this advice as reflecting the adviser's own prior experience and knowledge (Lerner & Malmendier, ; Lindquist et al, ; Sørensen, ).…”

“…Informal advice is distinct from coaching (Bryan et al, ), mentoring (Scott & Shu, ), and general feedback in a business‐plan competition (Clingingsmith & Shane, ; Howell, ). The advice that entrepreneurs seek out and receive (Vissa & Chacar, ) can be unstructured and highly dependent on the knowledge and experience of the adviser.…”

Exploring the Link Between Mentoring and Intangible Outcomes of Entrepreneurship: The Mediating Role of Self-Efficacy and Moderating Effects of Gender

“…It has been observed that low self-efficacy is one of the barriers to women's engagement in more lucrative business industries (Wieland et al, 2019). However, when women in mentoring programs are fully committed to their ideas, they are likely to achieve similar results as their male counterparts especially in terms of venture financing and commercialization (Scott and Shu, 2017). Although this shows that men and women could benefit equally from entrepreneurial mentoring, it is more possible if all factors such as gender roles, access to resources, and social cultural constraints are kept constant for both males and females.…”

“…There is a big gender gap in entrepreneurship ( Guzman and Kacperczyk, 2019 ). This is not only true regarding the number of women going into entrepreneurship but also in terms of success and persistence ( Smith and Tolbert, 2018 ; Oppedal and Garcia, 2019 ) and is more pronounced in high-growth ventures ( Scott and Shu, 2017 ). Moreover, even efforts to improve entrepreneurial outcomes tend to be more successful among men than women due to several constraints including time and low credit ( Oppedal and Garcia, 2019 ).…”

Networking Frictions in Venture Capital, and the Gender Gap in Entrepreneurship

“…Between 2008 and 2020, the share of annual U.S. VC capital raised by female founders ranged between 1.7 percent and 2.7 percent, with no upward trend. 3 A growing literature, including Becker-Blease & Sohl (2007), Scott & Shu (2017), Gornall & Strebulaev (2018), and Ewens & Townsend (2019) has documented the gap in various ways, but has never directly addressed 1 The NVC is Harvard's flagship new venture competition and a key gateway to VC-backed entrepreneurship after HBS. Many successful founders, including those of 'unicorn' startups such as Rent the Runway and Oscar Health, have been participants in the NVC.…”