[newsgourmet]

I'd scrutinize the study more before jumping to conclusions. for starters, there may be few actual women affected by it, as few female founders tackle "male dominated industries".

Another thing that stuck out to me immediately was the "venture quality" metric - apparently an evaluation by the Tech Crunch Disrupt competition? It seems possible that women got elevated scores there (as for example girls are known to get elevated grades in school), as no money is at stake for the judges, but the elevation bonus goes away once real investor money is at stake.

Other factors might play into it, too (just as with the gender pay gap, which is not at all what it seems), but it takes more time to parse the paper.

In any case, the suggestion to use the results to beat other investors by specializing in women seems sound. If you believe the study, why wouldn't you?

[AltonWells]

It's pretty well documented that women have difficulty accessing capital (and less women in VC). Nothing is ever non-nuance but here are a few high quality sources.

https://hbr.org/2020/01/how-the-vc-pitch-process-is-failing-...

https://news.crunchbase.com/news/special-report-eu-lags-behi...

[newsgourmet]

I don't immediately trust such studies, which are created with ideological bias. Afaik even the famous "blind orchestra auditions" study has been debunked by now.

Most VC capital comparisons like that neglect that women tend to do startups in other industries than men. At least the one from the HN submission here tries to correct for that.

Theranos has shown that women can raise a lot of capital.

Edit: from the first link "VCs who are scouting for extreme outperformers may be underwhelmed by women’s more measured pitching style." - this could be a huge part of it, if women tend to do less ambitious startups. For example. The basic assumption that men and women do the same startups and the only difference is their gender is probably wrong.

Edit: the second article argues with the usual "only x% of vc partners are women" and neglects to mention that far less women try to do startups.

[rmak]

It is hard to believe this when women are given female quotas and companies are forced to hire women.

[AltonWells]

Yes. Gender diversity is a goal. Therefore requires direct action. In the 1950’s schools were forced to let black kids in. If in n number of years we have a female dominated work environment and men only make up 10% of our leadership then let’s make a men’s movement.

[newsgourmet]

So 10% is the magic number? Men falling behind in academia doesn't count yet? Once there are more than 10% women in IT and startups, we can officially stop the diversity movement?