“Women are just outside of those established networks,
and if you’re outside the networks, you don’t get the knowledge, you don’t get the opportunities, you don’t get the contacts and you don’t get the funding,” said Susan Coleman, a business professor at the University of Hartford and co-author of the Third Way report.
“The problem when you have five white men who all went to the same business school
and worked in the same firms is their networks overlap, so they don’t draw from a very wide source of entrepreneurial deal flow,” Mr. Gompers said.
Founders of start-ups financed by venture capitalists are almost all male
and white or Asian, according to a study by Paul Gompers, a professor at Harvard Business School, and Sophie Wang, a Harvard graduate student.
Just 19 percent of top executives are women, according to a LeanIn.org
and McKinsey report, and a main reason they don’t rise is because they are less likely to have mentors in senior leadership.
The reason, according to the research: People with experience mentor
and give money to people like themselves, while those starting out do what they see people like themselves doing.
Those who do own companies are half as likely as male founders to employ anyone other than themselves,
and they generally earn less in revenue, according to census data analyzed in a new report by Third Way, a think tank.
Ninety-one percent are men, 80 percent are white and 16 percent are Asian.
Research shows that women around the world are less likely to consider entrepreneurship as a career path, largely
because they don’t see other women entrepreneurs as role models.
