Gender-related bias partly explains why men are more likely than women to found start-up companies and why they hold more jobs in science-related fields, according to two studies published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1, 2.
In one study1, Alison Wood Brooks, a social psychologist at Harvard Business School in Boston, Massachusetts, and her colleagues showed videos of US entrepreneurial pitch competitions to experienced business investors. The investors were 60% more likely to invest in pitches presented by men than by women. What's more, attractiveness gave the men, but not the women, an advantage. This effect was independent of the investor's gender.
To rule out the possibility that the content of each pitch affected the outcome, the researchers showed 194 volunteers the same pitch video, narrated by a man or a woman and accompanied by a photograph of a sex-matched entrepreneur of higher or lower attractiveness. The volunteers were more likely to invest in pitches narrated by a man, especially if they thought he was attractive, but attractiveness did not make female entrepreneurs more competitive.
That finding surprised study co-author Laura Huang, a behavioural economist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. "We had expected that attractiveness might give females a 'premium', mainly because there is much more attention paid to females being concerned about appearance," she says.
From: www.nature.com
