Entrepreneurs looking for advice on pitching their business ideas will find abundant resources on what to include in their presentations but less about how to respond to questions. Is it wise to showcase strategies to deal with a project's risks? Is it smart to show competitive aggressiveness? Are there downsides to being too intense? Evidence suggests that the answers to those questions depend in part on whether you're male or female.
Recent studies in the U.S. and Europe have explored ways that the fundraising process may be gender biased. Understanding the dynamics at play could help explain why, for instance, venture capitalists (VCs) overwhelmingly provide more venture capital to male entrepreneurs than to female entrepreneurs. In the U.S., women-led companies received only 2.2% of venture capital dollars in 2018.
Research published last year in the Academy of Management Journal observed gender bias in the Q&A interplay between investors and entrepreneurs. Coauthors Dana Kanze, Laura Huang, Mark A. Conley, and E. Tory Higgins found that male entrepreneurs tend to receive "promotion-focused" questions (in the domain of gains) and female entrepreneurs tend to receive "prevention-focused" questions (in the domain of losses). This difference in questions helped to account for the gender disparity in their funding amounts.