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Gender, race, and entrepreneurship: A randomized field experiment on investors

papers.ssrn.com

41–50 of 162 posts

Re: Gender, race, and entrepreneurship: A randomized field experiment on investors

#41
post #7
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Our results suggest that investors do not discriminate against female or Asian entrepreneurs when evaluating unsolicited pitch emails... Are they implying that investors do discriminate against non-Asian males? Why write it the other way around.

From omission it seems they reply less to black and white men. But these groups are large, however, sadly I don’t think it’d be easy to test on feigned education/class, so we won’t know what causes the bias.

If you’re curious about why they didn’t include black names:

> After long and thoughtful consideration, we discarded the idea of assigning African-American names to our fictitious entrepreneurs. First, there has been a concern about the ability to disentangle race and socioeconomic perception by using distinctly African-American names (Fryer and Levitt (2004)). Second, and most importantly, African-American entrepreneurs are woefully underrepresented in high-impact entrepreneurship (less than 1%, see Gompers and Wang (2017)). This poses a substantial challenge for our setup, because even names that are disproportionately likely to be African-American in the general population (such as “Martin Jackson”) may not be perceived as African-American by investors in this context. Studying discrimination against African-Americans and other underrepresented minorities in high-impact entrepreneurship remains an important problem.

Re: Gender, race, and entrepreneurship: A randomized field experiment on investors

#42

Same thing with job applications: "In an attempt to increase workplace diversity, the Australian public service implemented a .. trial removing all mention of gender and ethnicity from applications. It was found that removing gender from thousands of applications made women less likely to advance through the recruitment process compared to cases where gender was visible. The trial found that a woman's name on an appl…

Yes, in France there was a large scale "anonymous CV" experiment, and going against what was expected, made people from minorities or poor neighbourhoods more disadvantaged.

https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2011/04/04/le-cv-anon...

Re: Gender, race, and entrepreneurship: A randomized field experiment on investors

#43
This paragraph jumps out at me:

> For our entrepreneurial email senders, we opted to use distinctively East-Asian (i.e., Asian) and Western-European (i.e., White) last names, both paired with common American first names that are distinctively female or male. Asians are overrepresented in the U.S. venture capital space, relative to their fraction of the U.S. population. Gompers and Wang (2017) report that 11% of U.S. entrepreneurs backed by venture capital firms are Asian, as are 11% of U.S. VCs, compared to 5% of the U.S. labor force. Despite this, past audit studies uniformly find strong discrimination against Asians (see Section 4 for more details). Correspondence studies that look at discrimination against both Asian and Black applicants often find that both groups face similar level of discrimination (e.g., Wood, Hales, Purdon, Sejersen, and Hayllar (2009); Booth, Leigh, and Varganova (2012); and Milkman, Akinola, and Chugh (2012)). This bias extends to Asians who do not appear to be foreigners. For example, Oreopoulos (2011) finds that Asians with English first names, Canadian university degrees, and several years of Canadian work experience get 21% fewer callbacks than similar White Canadian job applicants.

That effect seems quite large. Doesn’t that indicate (rather conclusively?) a large amount of pro-Asian bias?

Re: Gender, race, and entrepreneurship: A randomized field experiment on investors

#44
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly how science should work. You can't perform a study, look at the data and pick a result that suits your bias. You're supposed to suggest a hypothesis, and conduct your experiment. If the results contradict your hypothesis, it doesn't mean the opposite of your hypothesis is true, simply that your hypothrsis was false, and that's ok. It's also more impressive that they have simply published their results…

So you think the data is only relevant to the hypothesis you decided it's relevant for before you collect it? "Have you seen the fire sir?" "I have only seen smoke" "But have you seen the fire?" "It's irrelevant because I was only looking for smoke!". I mean I know they teach it in naive introductory experiment design in some soft science departments but c'mon it's neither smart nor correct. If you need a separate ex…

Well, you can test multiple hypotheses at the same time. You just can't decide what the hypotheses are after you collect the data because you can't reasonably determine the correction factor.

Re: Gender, race, and entrepreneurship: A randomized field experiment on investors

#45
post #24

Same thing with job applications: "In an attempt to increase workplace diversity, the Australian public service implemented a .. trial removing all mention of gender and ethnicity from applications. It was found that removing gender from thousands of applications made women less likely to advance through the recruitment process compared to cases where gender was visible. The trial found that a woman's name on an appl…

Nobody prevents Indian women to apply for H1B jobs in US. > Its counter-productive to institute gender and diversity requirements at (tech) companies, where the core problem is at the fundamental immigration level. I don't see anything counterproductive in blind recruitment. It's a normal practice, along with randomizing resume review in a few big companies in places like India, or China exactly because the issue of…

Chinese and Indian cultures suppress female H1B applicants in systemic ways that the US can't influence even if it wanted to.

Re: Gender, race, and entrepreneurship: A randomized field experiment on investors

#46
post #11

Same thing with job applications: "In an attempt to increase workplace diversity, the Australian public service implemented a .. trial removing all mention of gender and ethnicity from applications. It was found that removing gender from thousands of applications made women less likely to advance through the recruitment process compared to cases where gender was visible. The trial found that a woman's name on an appl…

It will get even more India focused because of the latest laws.

[deleted]

Re: Gender, race, and entrepreneurship: A randomized field experiment on investors

#47
post #19

I wondered why they didn't report results for black versus white. Interestingly, they didn't run that: "After long and thoughtful consideration, we discarded the idea of assigning African-American names to our fictitious entrepreneurs. First, there has been a concern about the ability to disentangle race and socioeconomic perception by using distinctly African-American names (Fryer and Levitt (2004)). Second, and mos…

> are there unambiguously African-American names?

The part you quoted seems to say exactly that: there are unambiguously African-American names, but they are associated with low-class, low education backgrounds. Which might confuse the statistics as then the choice would not be purely about race but race and socioeconomic status.

Re: Gender, race, and entrepreneurship: A randomized field experiment on investors

#48
Just like it happens with software development, in some specific contexts nobody needs to know who you are, what you identify with or what you do when naked for your results to be considered worthy of evaluation or compensation. Focus on letting your product shine and be free to be yourself in total privacy, it's an advantage many persons unfortunately don't have.

Re: Gender, race, and entrepreneurship: A randomized field experiment on investors

#49

From abstract: ” Female entrepreneurs received 9% more interested replies than males pitching identical projects and Asians received 6% more than Whites. Our results suggest that investors do not discriminate against female or Asian entrepreneurs when evaluating unsolicited pitch emails and that future research on investor biases should focus on networks and in-person interactions.” In other words: The preferred resu…

Your summary is incorrect. They are not taking their results to indicate that their assumption is incorrect, but rather that the anti-female bias must be even stronger elsewhere to overcome the significant pro-female bias at initial stages.

Re: Gender, race, and entrepreneurship: A randomized field experiment on investors

#50

Same thing with job applications: "In an attempt to increase workplace diversity, the Australian public service implemented a .. trial removing all mention of gender and ethnicity from applications. It was found that removing gender from thousands of applications made women less likely to advance through the recruitment process compared to cases where gender was visible. The trial found that a woman's name on an appl…

You think diversity of talent is about the color of one's skin or what is between their legs? Your side has never proven themselves sane.
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