Thread by @jonsakoda

1/ The effects of gender imbalance in the VC industry have been well documented. Recent data suggests women represent just 9% of the VC industry, and there are 16x more male founded startups than female founded startups backed by VCs

2/ Many studies have highlighted the historic implicit bias against female entrepreneurs from VCs. But I was excited to learn this past week from Professor Ilya Strebulaev @StanfordGSB that there is new data to suggest behavior is changing

3/ In one of the largest randomized trials ever conducted last month, researchers sent >80k cold emails from 200 fake entrepreneurs to ~30k VCs and angels. If you are a VC, it is highly likely you got one of their pitch emails and participated in the trial #brilliant

4/ The only variable that changed in each outreach was the name / gender of the entrepreneur - the fictitious start-up ideas and backgrounds of the individuals were not changed. The study measured “positive response” and whether an investor was interested in taking a next step

5/ The results were surprising - women received a 7 percent HIGHER positive response rate than men. This was the exact opposite of what was expected in the study. The slight positive bias towards women was found across all sectors (B2B, B2C, and Healthcare) #changeiscoming

6/ To be clear this does NOT mean that we DON’T have gender bias. But it is positive evidence that suggests behavior is changing. Credit goes to all who have meaningfully increased awareness of this issue over several years including @tgr @aileenlee @AllRaise (and so many others)

7/ The full study is worth a read as the experiment examines the effectiveness of cold emailing by entrepreneurs and also filters for racial bias. Slides are courtesy of Professor Strebulaev: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…