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

Howell, Sabrina T.; Nanda, Ramana

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3376211

Cited by 12 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…However, as Jennings and Brush (2013) point out, research on how these biases might be mitigated is relatively scarce. An increasing number of studies have started to examine the potential impacts of firm and policy levers on participation, such as training programs Zhang, 2017, 2018) and access to networks (Howell and Nanda, 2019). Our study highlights the role of social movements in facilitating investment in female creators.…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 75%

Scandal, Social Movement, and Change: Evidence from #MeToo in Hollywood

Luo

Zhang

2022

Management Science

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Social movements have the potential to effect change in strategic decision making. In this paper, we examine whether the #MeToo movement, spurred by the Harvey Weinstein scandal, leads to changes in the likelihood of Hollywood producers working with female writers on new movie projects. Because #MeToo affected the entire industry, we use variation in whether producers had past collaborations with Weinstein to investigate whether and how #MeToo may spur change. We find that producers previously associated with Weinstein are, on average, about 35% more likely to work with female writers after the scandal than they were before, relative to nonassociated producers, and the size of this effect increases with the intensity of the association. Female producers are the main drivers of our results, perhaps because they are more likely than male producers to resonate with the movement’s cause and face relatively low costs of enacting change. Changes made by other groups, such as production teams with the most intense association with Weinstein and less experienced all-male teams, may be better explained by motivations to mitigate risk. We also find that producers do not sacrifice writer experience by hiring more female writers and that both experienced and novice female writers have benefited from the increased demand. Our study shows that social movements that seek to address gender inequality can, indeed, lead to meaningful change. It also provides perspective for thinking about whether, and to what extent, changes may occur in broader settings.

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Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 75%

Scandal, Social Movement, and Change: Evidence from #MeToo in Hollywood

Luo

Zhang

2022

Management Science

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“…In a somewhat related vein,Gompers and Wang (2017) find that most venture capital firms are male-dominated, although the hiring of female partners increases when male partners have daughters instead of boys as their own children. Finally,Howell and Nanda (2019) find that male entrepreneurs have a higher propensity to network with potential investors.…”

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confidence: 83%

Be Careful What You Ask For: Fundraising Strategies in Equity Crowdfunding

Hellmann¹,

Mostipan²,

Vulkan³

2019

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and the Saïd Business School is gratefully acknowledged. All errors are ours The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

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“…Second, our findings contribute to work on the rate and direction of innovation. While most work on the gender gap in innovation and entrepreneurship is focused on the entrepreneurs themselves (Gompers and Wang 2017;Scott and Shu 2017;Howell and Nanda 2019;Guzman and Kacperczyk 2019;Ewens and Townsend 2020), an emerging body of work has begun to show that product innovations appear to be oriented towards the needs of men over women (Koning, Samila, and Ferguson 2019;Feng and Jaravel 2019;Koning, Samila, and Ferguson 2020). Our results provide further evidence that this appears to be the case.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sampling Bias in Entrepreneurial Experiments

Cao¹,

Koning²,

Nanda³

2021

Self Cite

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Using data from a prominent online platform for launching new digital products, we document that the composition of the platform's 'beta testers' on the day a new product is launched has a systematic and persistent impact on success. Specifically, we use word embedding methods to classify products launched on this platform as more or less focused on the needs of female customers, and show that female-focused products launched on a typical day -when nine-in-ten users on the platform are men -experience 40% less growth and are 5 percentage points less likely to have an any users a year after launch. Using exogenous variation driven by the platform's daily newsletter, we find that that the product gender gap shrinks on days when women are more likely to engage with the platform. Conversely, entrepreneurs who happen to launch a female-focused product on an especially male-dominated day reduce their product development efforts by roughly 30% and are 4 percentage points less likely to raise venture funding. Overall, our findings suggest that sample bias can systematically corrupt signals of a startup's market potential, bias entrepreneurial strategy, and so lead to a dearth of innovations aimed at consumers who are underrepresented among early-users.

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

Cited by 12 publications

References 51 publications

Scandal, Social Movement, and Change: Evidence from #MeToo in Hollywood

Scandal, Social Movement, and Change: Evidence from #MeToo in Hollywood

Be Careful What You Ask For: Fundraising Strategies in Equity Crowdfunding

Sampling Bias in Entrepreneurial Experiments

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