Women venture capitalists underperform men: Study

San Francisco, Sept. 1: Women venture capitalists underperform their male counterparts by some 15 percent, according to a new Harvard University study, but the performance differences have narrowed over time and in firms that employ more than a single female venture partner.

“We find that female venture capitalists significantly underperform their male colleagues,” wrote Paul Gompers, Vladimir Mukharlyamov and Yuhai Xuan of Harvard and Emily Weisburst of the University of Texas at Austin in their study, “Gender Effects in Venture Capital.”

They blamed the performance difference in part on a lack of mentoring by male colleagues. The academics based their study on venture- capital investments made between 1975 and 2003, representing 26,087 invest- ments. Venture investments can take years to reach an outcome, making it difficult to include recent deals. The authors counted as successful the investments that led to an initial public offering of the company, or 4,622 IPOs. Only 4.6 per cent of IPOs had a female venture capital investor, authors said, concluding that investments made by them were 2.1 per cent less likely to go public.