The Dissimilar Effects of Similarity

It's hard to read what the popular press has to say about startups in general and tech startups in particular without reading about the conspicuous absence of women. The press is not alone in its concerns. I've interviewed dozens of tech entrepreneurs about their hiring practices and hear their concerns about not being able to hire enough women or about how difficult it is to create an atmosphere that would both make women want to join a startup, and a startup want to hire them. Through no fault of their own, Campero and Kacperczyk's paper does not provide an easy solution for these entrepreneurs who are interested in promoting greater diversity. In fact, they remind us just how complicated this issue can be. In their paper, they use data on online applications to and hiring in startups and a series of careful and subtle analyses to show that while having female founders might draw more women to apply to these firms, the presence of those female founders does nothing to increase female applicants' likelihood of landing an interview conditional on applying. Women suffer a penalty in getting interviewed regardless of whether men or women are leading these startups. The message is that increasing the presence of women in leadership positions does not in itself contribute much to solving the problem that these entrepreneurs raise to me.