A High-Profile Gender Discrimination Case Pushed VC Firms to Hire More Women. It’s Hardly Helped Female Entrepreneurs.

Ellen Pao’s high-profile gender discrimination lawsuit against venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins left a “dramatic impact” on the industry – but it hasn’t changed male investors’ inclination for investing in companies founded by women, according to a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research.

For two decades before the discrimination trial ended in 2015, the rate of hiring new female senior venture capital professionals in the U.S. hovered at a consistent 8 percent. In the years after the trial, however, the percentage of women hired in the venture capital industry increased by 50 percent, according to the study by Wharton School professor Sophie Calder-Wang and Harvard University’s Paul Gompers and Patrick Sweeney.

They found that the hiring rate for women increased steadily and incrementally over the last five years, landing at 17.7 percent in 2019. The researchers argued that the “high-profile” trial was a key component in this step toward gender parity in venture capital.

2005年，埃伦帕博于2005年举行的诉讼围绕着苏克林斯Caufielder聘请的诉讼，以便担任该公司董事总经理John Doer的工作人员的作用。七年后，2012年5月10日，PAO向Kleiner Perkins提出了性别歧视诉讼，声称她因性别而被忽视了促销。

The suit, which went to court in 2015, received ample media attention due to its high-profile status and testimonies from Silicon Valley stars. On March 27, 2015, the court concluded that Kleiner Perkins had not discriminated against Pao.

Calder-Wang, Gompers, and Sweeney attributed the trial’s effect on women in venture capital to its wide reach: The Pao trial was “widely covered in the broadcast and print media,” resulting in increased exposure among venture capitalists to issues specific to women in the sector. The researchers surveyed state-level Google search trends for the Pao trial in order to determine which states had more exposure to the case. After the court decision, researchers found states with higher Google search trends had the largest increase in hiring of female venture capital investors.

“The most important key finding here is that attention can change behavior,” Gompers, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, said in a phone interview with亚博赞助欧冠. “Based on the identification strategy we have in the paper, we can conclusively show that there’s a causal impact of this attention to the trial.”

For Gompers and his co-authors, this “causal impact” is evidenced in the exposed states’ mandated maternity benefits, which they used as a tool to measure the receptivity of exposure to gender inequity issues in venture capital as a result of the trial. In states with high exposure and receptivity, the trial had “a dramatic impact” on female hiring, the study said.

[IIDeep Dive:Venture Capital (Still) Has a Gender Problem]

“我认为这谈到了更广泛的社会运动可能会产生影响，但在一般文化接受这些类型的信息的地区，这种影响可能在很大程度上在很大程度上在很大程度上在很大程度上更加重要，”Gompers表示。亚慱体育app怎么下载

While the trial had a measurable effect on the number of women in the industry, the researchers suggest the impact did not extend far beyond hiring. From 2015 to 2019, the percentage of female founders receiving venture capital funding only increased by about 2 percentage points, according to the study.

“The data still isn’t gender parity,” said Gompers said. “I still think that there’s a long way to the industry has to go.”

在进行研究时，歌剧会和他的共同作者探讨了女性创始人的增加是由“男性风险资本家的增加倾向投资女创始人”造成的。但是，根据该研究，审判后女企业家的男性没有增加。相反，Uptick似乎完全被关联，以增加业内女性风险资本家的表达。

“总的来说，我们的结果与曝光引起的重要社会问题可能会影响招聘中固有的偏见，但脱扎依赖于对曝光的接受性，”本文说。“PAO试验的曝光效应是对雇用女性投资者的性别偏见，而不是一般暴露于性别偏见问题。”

Even with the increase in female venture capitalists, female participation rates in venture capital remain among the lowest in the financial services industry, ranking below those in fields such as consulting and investment banking. Gompers said he attributes the lack of gender parity in venture capital to an effect which entices people to “invest in people who look like them.”

“Those are the people in your network,” Gompers said. “So men disproportionality invest in men. Women venture capitalists do have a much higher fraction of their investments in women-founded companies and startups. So this lack of gender diversity in venture really affects the ability of female founders to get capital.”