Venture Like a Woman: The Influence of Gender and Venture Type on Investment Decisions

Using data on investor-pitch pairs from the televised pitch competition series Dragons Den (Shark Tank), I explore the impact of gender on investment decision-making. Providing a new lens through which to understand the agents-of-change/cogs-in-the-machine debate within organizational demography literature, I posit that advocating for female entrepreneurs is a costly choice for women, as they risk being seen as engaging in illegitimate favoritism. I suggest that women are more likely to favor women when the cost of doing so is lower, notably when the gender congruence of the task reduces the gender gap in expected future performance. Consistent with this prediction, I find that female investors are more likely than male investors to invest in women-led ventures, but only when the business idea is gender congruent. Women with gender-incongruent businesses do not benefit from pitching to a female rather than a male investor. I discuss the implications of my findings on long-term outcomes for women.