Female entrepreneurs often have to work against the odds in order to succeed, with various societal factors working against them.  Recent research from Harvard Business School suggests this might even extend to the feedback they receive.

The research examines the Product Hunt platform, where entrepreneurs can test out their concept among early adopters, who offer feedback on whether the product is good or not.  The researchers explain, however, that around 90% of users on the platform are men, which creates an inevitable bias as large parts of society are missing from the sample.

This problem is, they suggest, particularly problematic for female entrepreneurs who might be more inclined to develop products that address needs that are specific to female consumers.  As a result, they and their ideas may be discounted by the platform because they’re not the intended target market.

Gender gap

Of course, this isn’t a problem that’s unique to Product Hunt, and the researchers reveal that 75% of Kickstarter users are male, as are 67% of those on Indiegogo, and 79% of visitors to Hacker News.  This male dominance is also prevalent in tech companies and venture capital firms, which creates an environment whereby the advice you receive is quite likely to be coming from a man.

The researchers tested the impact of this sampling bias on around 6,000 products that had been released on Product Hunt between 2016 and 2018.  They used machine learning to analyze the descriptions of each product and classified them according to their appeal to female consumers.

When the performance of these products was assessed over time, they found that female-focused products grew by 40% less than male-focused and gender-neutral products a year after launch.  These products also had lower rates of venture funding and fewer users.

Possible cause

Now, this could, of course, simply be that female-focused products don’t sell as well as other products, but this was tested by the researchers and found that it wasn’t the case at all, which led them to believe that the lack of success was largely a consequence of the ill-suited feedback they received from the community.

This is especially so as recent research from Cambridge Judge Business School highlights the importance of pivoting to startup success.  Responding to feedback in the right way and at the right time is crucial to the long-term success of any new venture.

Given the male dominance of Product Hunt, the Harvard researchers advocate seeking out platforms with a more balanced demographic, although given the male dominance of many online platforms, this advice may not be all that helpful.  It’s also a problem that may well afflict other underrepresented groups, such as people of color.

“At the end of the day, the reason most of these platforms are dominated by men is because all the venture capitalists and engineers and other founders are mostly men,” the researchers conclude. “If you want a platform that is more diverse, then you need the larger ecosystem to be more diverse.”