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

Will Gornall () and Ilya A. Strebulaev ()
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Will Gornall: Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z2, Canada
Ilya A. Strebulaev: Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305; and National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138

Management Science, 2025, vol. 71, issue 6, 5308-5327

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: discrimination; gender; race; finance: investment criteria; finance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:71:y:2025:i:6:p:5308-5327

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