6 ms·

I don't get it :-/ Why is there a bias? Even if the VCs are totally unbiased, why couldn't the startups with women outperformed the others? It could happen for

• Alex3917 11y ago
  > Why is there a bias? Applications by definition are supposed to be biased. If an application weren't biased then it wouldn't be an application, it would just be a lottery. And while that's a system that a lot of charter schools actually use, or a least pretend to, I think it would be a tough sell to convince venture capitalists to allocate their capital this way.
• esfandia 11y ago
  Then, if I understand PG's argument correctly, the VCs should invest in even more startups-with-women, and lower their threshold on investing them, at least until they perform no better than startups-without-women.
  • wycats 11y ago
    Indeed!
• wycats 11y ago
  If that were the case, VCs should accept more companies-with-women, which would change the TOTAL mix of accepted candidates so that the women no longer overperformed. The issue, interestingly, is that there are a lot of women (or biased-against group) between the median performance and 160% performance who are being rejected. In other words, only the best women can get accepted, which means that above-median (but not superstars) are getting rejected, while many more above-median men are getting accepted. This has the ring of truth to me (as pg says, it's the definition of bias).