Gender and venture capital decision-making: the effects of technical background and social capital on entrepreneurial evaluations.

Research on gender and workplace decision-making tends to address either supply-side disparities between men's and women's human and social capital, or demand-side differences in the status expectations of women and men workers. In addition, this work often relies on causal inferences drawn from empirical data collected on worker characteristics and their workplace outcomes. In this study, we demonstrate how tangible education and work history credentials - typically associated with supply-side characteristics - work in tandem with cultural beliefs about gender to influence the evaluative process that underlies venture capital decisions made in high-growth, high-tech entrepreneurship. Using an experimental design, we simulate funding decisions by venture capitalists (VCs) for men and women entrepreneurs that differ in technical background and the presence of important social ties. We demonstrate the presence of two distinct aspects of VCs' evaluation: that of the venture and that of the entrepreneur, and find that the gender of the entrepreneur influences evaluations most when the person, rather than the venture, is the target of evaluation. Technical background qualifications moderate the influence of gendered expectations, and women receive more of a payoff than men from having a close contact to the evaluating VC. We discuss the implications for future research on gender and work.

Decisions, decisions: how program diversity influences residency program choice.

BACKGROUND: Recent studies suggest that students' feelings of fit with a residency program substantially influence students' ranking of the program. As diversity issues become increasingly focal concerns, we investigate how perception of gender and racial diversity of a program influences students' rankings of the program. We focus on students pursuing surgical specialties and ask whether diversity concerns are more prominent among applicants to surgical programs than among applicants to nonsurgical programs. STUDY DESIGN: We invited all interviewees at all residency programs at the Stanford University School of Medicine to participate in our study in the spring of 2009. Nineteen residency programs, amounting to 1,657 residency interviewees, participated. Sixty-eight percent (n = 1,132) responded to the survey. RESULTS: Women and under-represented minority applicants differ in their assessments from male and non-under-represented minority applicants because women applying to surgical programs and under-represented minority students are less likely than others to perceive their prospective programs as diverse. However, perceived program diversity is an important factor that positively influences the program ranking decision for women and minorities pursuing surgical training. CONCLUSIONS: Surgical training programs that promote gender and racial diversity will likely be more successful in attracting women and minority students because women and minorities are especially sensitive to program diversity in both their perceptions and rankings of programs. Promoting women and minorities within programs and connecting women and minority applicants to outreach programs and mentors is pertinent to the recruitment of these traditionally under-represented groups to surgical programs.