Investors Embrace Gender Diversity, but Not Female CEOs (opens in new tab)

To quote the abstract

  "Further, we construct machine learning models to predict whether startups will reach an equity round, revealing the surprising finding that the CEO's gender is the primary determining factor for attaining funding"

This caused me to raise my eyebrows a little bit. Throwing a bunch of data into an ML algorithm, hoping you captured all the factors and then boom suddenly it turns out the most important thing that determines whether or not you get funding is what kind of reproductive organs you have? When that happens to be what your thesis is to begin with?

I'd definitely love to see more of this ML model and what factors they fed it.

EDIT: After reading the paper, they dropped everything down to 8 variables, all of which were based solely on the founder, (I feel like including industry, and other factors would also be very influential factors) and although under their ML models they did manage to arrive at the conclusion that gender was the most predictive factor it less than 1% more predictive than the next highest factor and less than 7% more predictive than the 4th lowest factor.

Basically if the women is the CEO, their startups will not get as much funding by a factor of about 50.

Came across this paper while reading this below article from Forbes:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2021/02/09/ceo-gen...

PDF of paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.12008.pdf

this kinda of stats is really biaised by the nonlinearity of investments