Male and Female Entrepreneurs Get Asked Different Questions by VCs

How one dresses makes a big difference (see &quot;Dress For Success&quot; by Molloy), as well as height and general level of physical attractiveness (for both men and women). Scott Adams notes in &quot;How To Fail&quot; that even altering the timbre of your voice makes a difference, as well as your word choices.<p>I suspect that everywhere you look for a difference, you&#x27;ll find one.

This study does not adjust for age, experience, height, or anything really.<p>It&#x27;s enormously suceptible to a hidden variable effect. E.g. suppose males and females has different experience levels. The VCs questions might be the same after controlling for that, and so we should be researching why males and females have different experience levels. Instead, we&#x27;re looking in all the wrong places.<p>I&#x27;m not saying this is the case, but it reflects the quality of the study that even the basic stuff wasn&#x27;t considered.

It seems &quot;prevention&quot; questions would imply skepticism on the part of the questioner. You lightly touched upon this, but were there equally drastic discrepancies between the types of questions posed to male versus female founders in the presence of equal growth&#x2F;success metrics? I would certainly believe it -- maybe even expect it, but would love to hear more as this point really hammers home the extent of the bias

THIS. What a wonderful study.<p>Given a problem statement, the questions that emerge should objectively be largely based on the problem itself: the industry, competition, business models and risks. Regardless of whether it is being presented by a man, woman, monkey, or dog.<p>The only way the questions could change is if you already knew about the person, and if the objective of the questions was to test only weaknesses in the whole system including the people driving it, assuming the strengths.<p>This would then imply that <i>on average</i> the men <i>should</i> being tested on what the men are weaker at! And correspondingly for women.<p>I do not see this in the result set.

Excellent work and a fascinating result. Seems to me that both kinds of questions are fair game for any entrepreneur. Maybe if men were asked more &quot;prevention&quot; questions we&#x27;d get fewer big flameouts (Color Labs [0] comes to mind).<p>(Though I wonder about their use of the term &quot;Turing test&quot; -- do they mean &quot;A&#x2F;B test&quot;?)<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Color_Labs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Color_Labs</a>

This research illustrates beautifully how tech&#x27;s pervasive and durable gender disparity problems are not solely attributable to a handful of deviant &quot;assholes being assholes&quot; and egregious actions such as obvious sexual harassment.<p>Many people who think of themselves as well-meaning and who are perfectly comfortable acknowledging that problems exist also play a role in perpetuating the negative status quo. These individuals are an opportunity for constructive engagement and real progress.

Men and women are different. It makes sense to ask different questions. If I&#x27;m choosing which companies to invest millions of dollars in, you can bet I&#x27;ll take woman specific issues, such as pregnancy, into consideration. The idea of a universal, gender blind rule set is absurd to rational decision making.

this is because men and women are not the same. they&#x27;re different.

Clap clap, fantastic research.

Women in cave feeding the babies. Men venture far and hunt with spear.<p>Welcome to the stone age all over again :)

Success of your project isn&#x27;t entirely objective or logical. Why do we expect the process to funding your project would be? You know, I heard that sometimes wealthy parents will invest millions of dollars in their children&#x27;s projects. How incredibly biased of them. They don&#x27;t even ask tough questions in the due diligence process.