Do Female Executives Drive Start-up Success?

If I'm reading the study correctly the impact seems to be: 1) There is a correlation between female execs and success, so companies that tend to do better are also companies that tend to have female executives. 2) We can't make any statements about causation, so this means it's not effective for companies to just say let's hire female executives--without fixing any underlying reasons they didn't before. In fact I'd guess it's more likely that both success and having female executives is a result of a better firm culture/outlook rather than one of them being the direct cause of the other.

I wonder if these companies are actually kitchens.

I think that female executives have this inner intuition that connects them well with customers; that's why they're doing well on social media. Just a thought.

One other factor that's missing from the study is the level of success achieved by the companies. Instead of just grouping companies into "Generating Revenue"/"Profitable" or "IPO'd", they should have done a breakdown by how successful the company is. If the stereotype that bell curves for men and women have the different stdevs is true, then the data would show that companies founded by men have both a higher chance of failure (higher risk) but also a larger return on investment. Unfortunately, most gender based studies tend to only care about the means of the samples and ignore the stdevs. For something like the founding of a successful company, the black swans at the tail of the bell curves matter more than the rest of the bell curve which consists of failures or mediocre successes.