Gender, Race, and Entrepreneurship: A Randomized Field Experiment on Venture Capitalists and Angels

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Gornall, Will; Strebulaev, Ilya A.
• 署名单位: University of British Columbia; Stanford University; National Bureau of Economic Research
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2024.4990
• 发表日期: 2025
• 关键词: discrimination; GENDER; RACE; finance: investment criteria; finance

摘要

We study gender and race in high-impact entrepreneurship using a tightly controlled randomized field experiment. We sent out 80,000 pitch emails introducing promising but fictitious start-ups to 28,000 venture capitalists and angels. Each email was sent by a fictitious entrepreneur with randomly assigned gender and race. 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.