Gender stereotypes in technology startups Professors Tonoyan, Strohmeyer, and Jennings explore how gender stereotypes shape job application intentions in emerging technology startups. A compelling study, led by Dr. Vartuhi Tonoyan of the Craig School of Business at California State University (Fresno) and Dr. Robert Strohmeyer from the University of Mannheim in collaboration with Dr. Jennifer Jennings from the University of Alberta, examines how gender stereotypes impact job seekers’ decisions to apply to technology startups. Titled “Working for Jessica or Michael? Implications of Gender Stereotypes for Job Application Intentions at Technology Startups”, it has recently been accepted for publication in the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal.

This research is an overview - based on big data and algorithm-based identification - of the representation of women in firm leadership in over 30 million large family and non-family firms in 103 countries. The deficits in gender equality in leadership positions worldwide that it reveals, and the implied ignorance of the principle of selecting the best leader from a joint pool of men and women, provide a science-based confirmation that human societies need to develop further if they are to meet the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 5 Gender Equality and so extend human progress and potential. From a global perspective, we show that female representation at the top management level is higher in family firms compared to non-family firms and there is high heterogeneity across countries.

Research SummaryWe examine a critical yet underexplored aspect of human resource management in nascent technology ventures: employee recruitment. Applying theories of gender stereotyping, we contend that female-led technology startups face greater obstacles in attracting job applicants than their male counterparts. Evidence from a randomized online experiment conducted in 2020/2021 with 777 US job seekers substantiates this barrier, indicating that the disparities are partly rooted in gender-stereotypical perceptions of female technology entrepreneurs as less competent, agentic, and warm, which contribute to less favorable assessments of their ventures' economic potential and employee empowerment potential. Startups with gender-diverse leadership teams appear to overcome these biases. Confirmatory evidence comes from a 2024 replication study with 455 US job seekers, underscoring the need to address gender biases in the technological ecosystem.Managerial SummaryIn the competitive landscape of technology startups, attracting talent is key. Our study reveals that startups with female leaders face gender biases during recruitment, with job candidates perceiving female technology entrepreneurs as less competent, agentic, and warm-and their startup ventures as less likely to have what it takes to grow and to empower employees. Analysis from a randomized online experiment involving 777 US job seekers in 2020/2021 and a follow-up study with 455 US job seekers in 2024 confirm such biases. Crucially, a gender-balanced leadership team significantly counters such biases, enhancing the venture's appeal to potential hires. These insights highlight the need for technology startups to promote gender diversity within their leadership to dismantle stereotypes and attract a broader talent pool.

Sex-based labour market segregation and women's perceptions of entrepeneurship Here Professors Tonoyan, Strohmeyer, and Jennings investigate sex-based labour market segregation and women's perceptions of entrepreneurship. As noted in a prior Open Access Government article, women tend to participate in entrepreneurial activity at lower rates than men within most countries included in the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. Numerous plausible reasons for this gender gap exist. A large-scale study by Professors Vartuhi Tonoyan (California State University, Fresno), Robert Strohmeyer (University of Mannheim), and Jennifer E. Jennings (University of Alberta) put forth and examined the argument that women are likely to possess less favourable perceptions than men, on average, of how easy it would be to start a business. These scholars further argued that this disparity can be attributed to sex-segregated positions within traditional wage-and-salary employment, which present structural disadvantages for women’s entrepreneurship.

Countries around the world have shared understanding and unconscious biases of what abilities and personality characteristics men and women possess, and how each gender should or should not behave. Gender stereotypes tend to cast men as more competent, strong, and agentic, and women as more communal, warm, and other-oriented compared to members of the opposite sex. Partly because of such gender stereotypes, men and women are perceived and evaluated differently, and they perceive and evaluate themselves differently. Gender stereotypes are consequential: they impact women’s career choices and advancement to the management and top-level positions in the corporate sector, their likelihood of founding new ventures and receiving key financial, human capital, and network resources necessary for scaling up their businesses, their job performance, cognitive resources, and professional fulfillment. Our symposium makes a direct contribution to the 2022 AOM’s theme “Creating a Better World Together”, promoting cross-disciplinary dialogue among scholars from (social) psychology, sociology, entrepreneurship, economics, and organization theory to deepen our understand of ‘how, why, and when’ gender stereotypes are likely to influence male-female differentials in the corporate leadership and entrepreneurship. Our symposium has two goals. We bring together scholars to take stock of the literature, identify puzzles in extant work and future research directions, and build bridges for interdisciplinary research. Our symposium features pioneers from (social) psychology whose work on stereotypes has been path-breaking and is considered foundational in research on attitudes, gender, and diversity, along with strong emerging scholars working at the ‘biases and entrepreneurship’ research nexus. Our second goal is to discuss the effectiveness of existing behavioral interventions to combat gender stereotypes and increase gender leadership diversity in both labor market contexts. The symposium is designed to foster a dialogue between the panelists, discussants, and the audience centered around five discussion topics. It will close with the organizers’ summary synthesizing the scholarly exchange. The symposium is designed for researchers in ENT, OMT, and GDO but could be of interest to a much broader AoM audience interested in research on stereotypes, diversity in leadership and innovation, and organizational performance.

Purpose Existing entrepreneurship literature has provided mixed evidence as to whether resource providers discriminate against female-led innovative start-up ventures in their resource commitment decisions either in terms of the likelihood or conditions of resource provision. While some studies revealed evidence indicative of negative discrimination against female entrepreneurs, others have provided evidence suggestive of positive discrimination. In light of these divergent findings, the purpose of this paper is to develop a more nuanced and integrative approach to studying gender biases in entrepreneurial resource provision with greater attention paid to both moderating contingency factors and mediating mechanisms. Design/methodology/approach The authors develop a conceptual model and empirically testable propositions describing whether, how and when entrepreneurial resource providers are likely to under-, over- and equivalue female-led innovative start-up ventures relative to equivalent male-led start-up ventures. The model applies not only to institutional or private investors as providers of financial capital to start-up ventures as discussed extensively in extant entrepreneurship literature but also to prospective employees as providers of human capital and prospective consumers as providers of money in exchange for an entrepreneurial product or service. The authors discuss the gender-typing of the entrepreneur's core product/service offering as a key contingency factor likely to moderate the proposed relation. The authors further delineate the importance of what they refer to as the "first"- and "second-order" mediating mechanisms underlying the hypothesized relation between resource provider evaluations of the male versus female founder-CEO, the attractiveness of his/her start-up venture and the (conditions of) resource provision to their start-ups. Findings Building on social-psychological theories of descriptive and prescriptive gender stereotypes and extant entrepreneurship literature, the authors establish that gender biases are likely to occur because of resource providers' perceptions of women entrepreneurs at the helm of male-typed start-up ventures to be less competent and agentic, as well as less warm and other-oriented than equivalent male entrepreneurs leading male-typed start-up ventures. The authors discuss the implications of such gender-biased evaluations for the application of stricter performance standards to female-led-male-typed start-up ventures and the likelihood and conditions of resource provision to their companies. The authors further discuss why and when female founder-CEOs of a female-typed (gender-neutral) start-up venture are likely to be overvalued (equivalued) compared to equivalent male founder-CEOs. The authors also develop propositions on additional contingency factors and mediators of the gendered evaluations of founder-CEOs and their start-up ventures, including resource providers' "second-order" gender beliefs, the high-cost versus low-cost resource commitment, individual differences in gender stereotyping and the perceived entrepreneurial commitment of the founder-CEO. The authors conclude by suggesting some practical implications for how to mitigate gender biases and discrimination by prospective resource providers. Originality/value Discussing the implications of descriptive and prescriptive gender stereotypes on evaluative decisions of entrepreneurial resources providers, this study advances not only the women's entrepreneurship literature but also the more-established scholarship on the role of gender stereotypes for women's advancement opportunities in the corporate world that has traditionally viewed entrepreneurship as the solution for women fleeing the gender-stereotype-based discrimination in the corporate setting to advance their careers.

This study addresses a highly relevant yet under-investigated topic within research at the nexus of gender, entrepreneurship and innovation: potential gender bias by prospective employees of innovative start-ups in male-typed industries. Drawing upon gender stereotype content theory, we suggest that potential recruits are likely to form less favorable impressions of a female (versus male) founder-CEO’s perceived agency, warmth, and competence, which will spillover to reduce impressions of a female-led (versus male-led) venture’s employer attractiveness, with both sets of perceptions ultimately resulting in a lower willingness to commit human capital to innovative start-ups headed by women. Findings from a randomized online experiment completed by 654 job-seekers reveal a ‘double-female punishment’ versus ‘double-male reward’ when the gender composition of other TMT members is also taken into account.

The entrepreneurship literature has provided mixed evidence as to whether various resource-providers —such as actual investors or hypothetical providers of financial capital, technology office licensers, consumers, as well as potential employees— discriminate against female-led innovative start-up ventures in their resource-commitment decisions in terms of the likelihood and terms of resource provision. While some studies revealed evidence indicative of negative discrimination against female entrepreneurs, others have provided evidence of positive discrimination. Yet, another set of studies suggested that entrepreneurial resource-providers are “gender-blind” in their evaluations after accounting for differentials in individual, organizational, and industry characteristics of female- and male-led ventures. These divergent findings point to the need for a more nuanced and integrative approach to studying gender biases in entrepreneurial resource provision, with greater attention paid to both moderating contingency factors and mediating mechanisms. We develop a conceptual model and empirically-testable propositions discussing when, how, and why entrepreneurial resource-providers are likely to undervalue, equivalue, and overvalue female-led innovative ventures. Our model discusses the importance of a key contingency that is likely to influence evaluations of female- and male-led innovative ventures by resource providers: the gender-typing of the entrepreneur’s product or service offering. We further discuss the mediating channels through which gender stereotyping is likely to influence the valuation of female- versus male-led ventures. Our model develops a systematic framework and empirically-testable propositions for assessing the occurrence of gender biases in entrepreneurial evaluations and the ensuing resource provision to innovative start-up ventures. We conclude with implications for future entrepreneurship research.

Although scholars have long recognized the consequences of sex-based labor market segregation for gendered outcomes in conventional wage-and-salary employment, comparatively little is known about the implications for entrepreneurship. We call attention to implications stemming from manifestations at distinct levels of analysis, specifically to the differential structural positions that men and women are likely to occupy as employees and to the degree of sex-based labor market segregation in a country overall. We hypothesize that the gendering of labor market positions will have the first-order effect of reducing women’s likelihood of acquiring entrepreneurship-relevant resources, experiencing entrepreneurial career previews, and being exposed to industry opportunity spaces for launching new firms, which will have the second-order effect of lowering their start-up ease perceptions relative to men’s. We further suggest that this gender gap will widen in societies with more highly sex-segregated labor markets. Data from 15,742 employees in 22 European countries provide strong support for these claims. By demonstrating how pre-entry assessments of entrepreneurship are influenced by gendered employment experiences at the individual level and gendered labor market regimes at the country level, this study lays a foundation for further multilevel research on the relationship between institutionalized labor market practices and entrepreneurial activity.

We advance a theory delineating the consequences of the entrepreneur’s skill diversity for the firm’s likelihood of high growth. We suggest that firms headed by jack-of-all-trades entrepreneurs are more likely to exhibit high growth, and this relationship is partially mediated by the firm-level innovation. Multilevel mediation analyses of 357 German start-ups lend overall support, showing that skill diversity has both a direct and an indirect effect on high growth through the firm’s “depth of innovation”, i.e., the frequency and degree of novelty of its new offerings. Industry dynamism acts as a catalyst for entrepreneurs possessing most diverse competencies and skills.

We propose four papers that collectively contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of gender inequalities in entrepreneurship: they draw on different theoretical perspectives and conduct analyses at different levels of units: the first two papers will focus on macro-level conditions at country level, comparing how institutional and structural conditions across countries affect men’s and women’s representations in entrepreneurship by, for example, offering different types of incentives to men and women to start businesses. The last two papers investigate gender inequalities in different forms of entrepreneurship by differentiating self-employment from founding new organizations and theorizing the various mechanisms that drive women’s entry into different segments of entrepreneurship.

This study examines whether, how and why an entrepreneur's gender influences firm innovativeness. Drawing upon research on gender-segregated educational and employment experiences, we suggest that firms led by women will exhibit less innovation breadth and depth than those led by men due to differences in the degree to which male versus female entrepreneurs resemble ‘jacks-(or jills)-of-all trades’. Analysis of survey data collected from 900 business owner-managers in Germany lends overall support—albeit with some noteworthy exceptions. Our findings point to the need for an even more nuanced approach to research at the nexus of gender, entrepreneurship, and innovation.

Der vorliegende Bericht stellt die Ergebnisse einer Systemevaluierung der Forderinitiative KMU-innovativ des BMBF dar. Die Evaluierung startete Ende 2008 und damit ein Jahr nach dem Beginn der Forderinitiative im Herbst 2007. Sie hatte zum Ziel, die Implementation, Zielerreichung und Wirkung der Forderinitiative sowie ihre Position in der Forderlandschaft zu bewerten. Die hier vorgelegten Ergebnisse bilden die Erfahrungen der ersten dreieinhalb Jahre der Umsetzung von KMU-innovativ ab. Die Forderinitiative KMU-innovativ wurde als Teil der Hightech-Strategie der Bundesregierung eingefuhrt und zielt darauf ab, die Beteiligung von kleinen und mittleren Unternehmen (KMU) in den Fachprogrammen des BMBF zu erhohen, indem der Zugang zur Fachprogrammforderung administrativ vereinfacht, beschleunigt und starker an den spezifischen Anforderungen von forschenden KMU ausgerichtet wird. Die Ansatzpunkte von KMU-innovativ umfassen folgende strukturellen und prozessualen Komponenten: Regelmasige (halbjahrliche) Auswahlrunden, ein zweistufiges Antragsverfahren, feste Fristen fur die einzelnen Verfahrensschritte, ein umfassendes Beratungsangebot durch die Projekttrager und den eigens eingerichteten Lotsendienst fur Unternehmen bei der Forderberatung Forschung und Innovation des Bundes sowie kleinere Projektgrosen und -verbunde sind die Kernelemente von KMU-innovativ. Diese Masnahmen strukturieren nachvollziehbar den Antrags- und Bewilligungsprozess und erleichtern den KMU die Planung der zur Forderung eingereichten FuEProjekte.

Der vorliegende Bericht stellt die Ergebnisse der Evaluation der BMBF-Fordermasnahmen BioChance und BioChancePlus dar. Beide zielten als Vorlaufer der Forderinitiative KMUinnovativ: Biotechnologie darauf ab, innovative und anspruchsvolle Forschungsvorhaben von kleinen und mittleren Unternehmen in der Biotechnologie zu ermoglichen. Die beiden Fordermasnahmen unterschieden sich in Forderziel und Design: Wahrend BioChance ab 1999 darauf abzielte, neu gegrundete Firmen zu unterstutzen, ging es in BioChancePlus ab 2003 darum, die weitere Entwicklung junger Biotechnologie-Unternehmen und deren risikoreichen Projekte voranzutreiben. Die vorliegende Analyse zeigt, dass BioChance und BioChancePlus eine angemessene Reaktion auf die Schwierigkeiten waren, mit denen die dedizierten Biotechnologie-Unternehmen in Deutschland in den Jahren 1999-2009 zu kampfen hatten. Die Fordermasnahmen wurden in ihrem Design jeweils adaquat weiterentwickelt und den Erfordernissen der Zielgruppe entsprechend angepasst. BioChance und BioChancePlus haben ihre Zielgruppen in hohem Mase erreicht: Von BioChance profitierten 15% der jungen Biotechnologiefirmen in Deutschland, der Nachfolger BioChancePlus erreichte 40% seiner Zielgruppe. Insgesamt erhielten 260 Unternehmen eine Zuwendung. 85% davon wurden nur einmal gefordert. Die offentliche Forderung stellte eine wichtige, jedoch keineswegs die dominierende Finanzierungsquelle fur die Unternehmen dar. So flossen im Zeitraum 2000-2009 rund 3 Mrd. Euro an VC-Investitionen in die Biotechnologie-Branche, wahrend sich die offentliche Forderung auf ca. 5% dieser Summe belief. Bei BioChance erhielten 17% der eingereichten Antrage eine Forderung, bei BioChancePlus waren es 29%. Insgesamt wurden durch die Masnahme BioChance etwa 36 Millionen Euro und durch BioChancePlus 133 Millionen Euro an Fordergeldern gewahrt.