[sarc off]
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| Science & Technology |
| Field experiment uses fake emails to measure gender and racial bias among startup investors, [finds bias against white males]. |
| 2019-07-15 |
| [PHYS.org] During his six years teaching a course on financing for startups, Ilya A. Strebulaev heard a common concern from students: Silicon Valley investors discriminate against women and people of color. A finance professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, Strebulaev had encountered plenty of anecdotes to support this assumption. Often-cited statistics also seemed to suggest gender bias: For every dollar invested in startups with female founders in 2017, male-founded companies got $35. And fewer than 10 percent of U.S. venture capitalists are women. Yet no field-based research had proven that startup investors favored white men. So Strebulaev set out to test the conventional wisdom in the real world. Along with Will Gornall, his former student and a finance professor at the University of British Columbia, Strebulaev sent 80,000 emails pitching fake startups to 28,000 venture capitalists and angel investors, signed with names indicating gender and ethnicity. The results of the field experiment were unexpected: Entrepreneurs with female and Asian-sounding names received a higher rate of interested replies than their presumed male or white counterparts. 80,000 emails - so he's a spammer "We were surprised to find bias in favor of female and Asian entrepreneurs at this initial stage of the investment pipeline," Strebulaev says. "That doesn't mean there's no discrimination against them overall—we know the pipeline is leaky, but we don't know where." |
| Posted by:Bright Pebbles |
| #7 Anti social pseudoscience. |
| Posted by: Bright Pebbles 2019-07-15 16:16 |
| #6 Is this what passes for a rigorously empirical social science experiment these days? And has this ever been different? social science is and has always been oxymoronic. |
| Posted by: AlanC 2019-07-15 15:05 |
| #5 I worked in venture capital before retiring. Lex is correct. Unsolicited proposals with no connection to know referrers go in the trash, or are routed to the most junior team members. Who are free to virtue signal since since nothing ever comes of such referrals. This 'study' is meaningless, and a Stanford prof should know that. |
| Posted by: Nero 2019-07-15 11:57 |
| #4 This just proves that most people are gullible. |
| Posted by: Dron66046 2019-07-15 11:37 |
| #3 Hold on there, perfesser... your test of bias is based on - what, willingness to hear a blind pitch? Is this a joke? Has it occurred to the researchers that maybe junior VC's get brownie points for going through the motions of hearing BS pitches from minority entrepreneurs? Is this what passes for a rigorously empirical social science experiment these days? |
| Posted by: Lex 2019-07-15 10:23 |
| #2 [sarc off] |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2019-07-15 08:57 |
| #1 A progress report for progressives. |
| Posted by: Bobby 2019-07-15 08:52 |