Topic: Gender, Race, and Entrepreneurship: A Randomized Field Experiment on Venture Capitalists and Angels

Speaker: Will Gornall, Assistant Professor of Finance, University of British Columbia, Sauder School of Business

Date: December 04, 2019 (Wednesday)

Time: 10:00am-11:30am

Location: 4-101, Building 1

Language: English

Abstract:

We study gender and race in high-impact entrepreneurship using a tightly controlled randomized field experiment. We sent out 80,000 pitch emails introducing promising but fictitious start-ups to 28,000 venture capitalists and angels. Each email was sent by a fictitious entrepreneur with a randomly selected gender (male or female) and race (Asian or White). Female entrepreneurs received a 9% higher rate of interested replies than male entrepreneurs pitching identical projects and Asian entrepreneurs received a 6% higher rate than their White counterparts. Our results suggest that investors do not discriminate against female or Asian entrepreneurs when evaluating unsolicited pitch emails.

About the speaker:

Will Gornall has been an assistant professor of finance at UBC since 2015. He currently teaches courses in venture capital and special topics in finance at the MBA level. Professor Gornall’s research interests are in corporate finance, venture capital and banking. His papers have been published in Journal of Financial Economics. Professor Gornall has a B.S. degree in Mathematics from University of Waterloo, a M.S. in Quantitative Finance from University of Waterloo, and a Ph.D. in Finance from Stanford Graduate School of Business.