In this age of startups, we see a lot of people leaving their conventional jobs and taking the entrepreneurial road. However, we all must have noticed that despite being just as capable we see a lesser number of women as founders compared to men. A research study was conducted by a professor Ethan Mollick on the same topic which yielded various reasons for this dearth of women in this industry. The results found were multi-faceted and have been discussed briefly in the article.
Being an entrepreneur is a game of confidence. To drop everything and start from scratch requires a lot of confidence, we might even say overconfidence. To be a successful entrepreneur you have to believe that you have what is takes. This kind of 'overconfidence' is known as Greek-style hubris — the idea of unfounded self-confidence. This has something to do with another study known as the "Male hubris, female humility effect". In a nutshell, men having more Hubris means that they are more overconfident in comparison to women. Men are more prone to something called "Fundamental Attribution Error". This basically means when something goes right, you take the credit but in a case of a failure you blame it on luck or other factors. On the other hand, women have more humility in them which is the opposite, that is, in the case of success, women tend to not take as much credit as a man in the same situation would.
The other aspect of the research was based on raising funds, both by crowd funding and VCs.
Here there were several factors controlling the situation. It was found that women were more likely to succeed when it came to crowdfunding as opposed to VCs. This can be attributed to a phenomenon called Homophily, which basically means love of the same or favoring things similar to yourself. This works out in the advantage of men as most of the VCs are males and hence tend to prefer males entrepreneurs over female.
Apart from this, there are other factors like the ongoing misogyny and various social barriers to females that prevent women from taking that step that men have no trouble taking. These are like additional barriers women have to face on their journey as opposed to men.
The solution to this problem is not very clear as of now. The only thing that seems to make sense is to increase the number of women as VCs, as this might help women over the Homophily effect they have been facing.
The number of women entrepreneurs being less is in no way an indication to the fact that women are less creative or intelligent or lack the skill required. This research just suggests that due a combination of factors some of which are internal and external, this number is low, but with changing times, nothing can be said for sure.
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