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You Pitch Like a Girl.
(under)representation in venture pitches by female founders.
by Marguerite Bellec
A few weeks ago, one of my female fellows showed me the pitch deck she was working on. In her very early twenties, charming, well-spoken, she is the founder of a green start-up that is working on creating resilient businesses through sustainable education and environmental actions. She has spoken to the EU parliament, is a UN ambassador and is currently working with several major companies. Yet this is her in her team slide below:
When I asked her what was wrong with this slide, she genuinely couldn’t see it. This unconscious representation is found again and again in female founders who constantly minimise their own achievements, focusing instead on their team, their financial partners or their academic teachers instead of highlighting their own achievements. In the same week, another female fellow did not want to put the CEO title under her name as the “legal status of her registered company would take 6 weeks to be official”. Two hours later, one of my male fellows happily called himself a “CEO of several successful green tech companies” on a slide, not caring that two of them consisted of just an idea and/or a website. Another week later, I was at an networking event where one of my male fellows, all of 17 years old, gave out this business card to the Head of Sustainability of a major German company.
Female characteristics hinder pitch’s success
This anecdotal behaviour is sadly nothing new. A 2017 study by “Don’t Pitch Like a Girl!: How Gender Stereotypes Influence Investor Decisions” consider the role that gender-stereotyped behaviours play in investors’ evaluations of men- and women-owned ventures. The main takeaway is the following:
Contrary to research suggesting that investors exhibit bias against women, they found that being a woman entrepreneur does not diminish interest by investors. Rather, the findings reveal that investors are biased against the display of feminine-stereotyped behaviors by entrepreneurs, men and women alike. The study finds that investor decisions are driven in part by observations of gender-stereotyped behaviors and the implicit associations with the entrepreneur’s business competency, rather than the entrepreneur’s sex.
Here is where it gets interesting:
In the earliest stage of seeking venture capital, being a woman does not negatively affect investors’ interest in learning more about the venture, but rather displaying stereotypically feminine behaviors leads to lower success rates:
- Ventures pitched by men were not more likely to be supported by investors than those pitched by women.
- Displaying masculine-stereotyped behaviors during the pitch did increase the chances of investor support, but not by a statistically significant amount however displaying feminine-stereotyped behaviors during the pitch decreased an entrepreneur’s chance of being selected as a finalist by 13 percentage points.
- Consistency between an entrepreneur’s sex and stereotypical gender-associated behaviors represent was not an important factor in whether or not he/she was selected as a finalist.
TLDR: Displaying feminine-stereotyped behaviors during a pitch negatively affected prospective investors’ assessment of the entrepreneur’s business competency.
Projecting confidence and ambition
These findings have been confirmed by a later 2023 study by intitled “What is your secret sauce to win?” — gender performance at entrepreneurial pitching.
It pointed out that successful founders give the impression that they are mission carriers (“We’re disrupting/saving/empowering ”) and are assertive with the success of the venture (“So stop wasting your time/money/materials”). Moreover, the self-confidence of the founders is expressed by semiotic signs.
In various pitches, they saw entrepreneurs raise both hands up equally or higher than their height when discussing the opportunities and growth of the venture. Although both men and women entrepreneurs made similar gestures to indicate their ability to win and their self-confidence, the movements of hands and arms, are often wider and wider for men founders (.
Similar to previous research their study showed that both men and women entrepreneurs use similar language styles and discourses that emphasise the performance of being confident, assertive, competent and charismatic. These traits are more socially related to masculinity, focusing on the masculine discourse of the ideal entrepreneur. This “” masculine portrayal has proven to be one of the most celebrated and dominant in the start-up world and is constructed as a risk taker, rational, powerful and in control of the situation. Think about the most well known startup founders, the Marks and Travis of the tech world, proudly saying that they “move fast and break things”. Even beloved grifters and scammers such as Elisabeth or Anna are often perceived as risk-takering mavericks, ambitious “girlbosses” (interestingly, both women’s scam careers started taking off when they changed their style to a more “masculine” look from blazers to black turtlenecks).
From the investors’ side, they were looking for the performance of heroic masculinity, indicating that possible unconscious bias is based on gender norms and the roles of entrepreneurial founders.
Many other studies also have also found proofs that investors tend to favour men over women founders regardless of similarities in background and experience because men are closely associated with attributes associated with being successful entrepreneurs. See for example one asking women to “start with a bold statement” or asking “men to win & women not to lose” this or even talking about the impact of attractiveness for female founders pitching.
So what’s next?
Here is what you can do as female founder
- Just keep pitching — be like Dory in Finding Nemo, only for pitching.
- Focus on three things: your background information and stories (logos), your credibility (ethos), and your emotional connection to the topic (pathos). Specifically, providing direct and indirect evidence that you have experience and knowledge of the proposed product/service type and/or in the relevant industry showcases your competence to lead the venture, thus increasing the perceived confidence of the audience.
- Rehearse with a bad audience. Whether it’s your friends or your mum, ask people you trust to act as a “bad audience” (scrolling on your phone, wandering off, talking to their neighbours). This will force you to become more engaging and modulating your voice. Ask them which words filtered through and caught their attention back. These are your key arguments.
- Get someone you love to record an audio version of the pitch. Especially for auditory learners, this will help you remember it and have nice associations with it. Get used to the sound of your own voice though :).
- Ask for help, feedback, training. People want to help. Let them.
