I have zero trouble believing that VCs are biased, but this is a terrible terrible study. First, their study collected literally zero data about venture capita

I have zero trouble believing that VCs are biased, but this is a terrible terrible study. First, their study collected literally zero data about venture capitalists. Their first experiment looked at "pitch competitions", where people give speeches and/or submit business plans to a set of judges, and the judges pick a winner. This is distinct from events like Demo Day because there is no follow-up or due diligence: choices are made solely based on the speech/written plan. For obvious reasons, these "competitions" usually don't involve serious money. Picking three at random from Google, the first prizes were $1,000, $3,000, and "a meeting with Andreesen Horowitz", plus a bunch of discounts from Rackspace and so on. The second and third experiments were even sillier. They literally recruited a bunch of random people on Mechanical Turk, asked them to watch a pitch video, and then asked them to judge which company they thought was more likely to succeed. And even if you did a study showing that VCs invested in men more often, that wouldn't mean VCs are biased: you have to control for a bunch of other factors too. If, eg. startup employees preferred to work for companies run by attractive men, a perfectly unbiased VC would invest in attractive men more often, just because their companies were objectively doing better. Here's a link to the original paper: http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/Brooks%20Huang%20Kearney%20Murray_59b551a9-8218-4b84-be15-eaff58009767.pdf http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/Brooks%20Huan...