Investors prefer entrepreneurial ventures pitched by attractive men | Hacker News Reader

Investors prefer entrepreneurial ventures pitched by attractive men

pnas.org

71 pointseegilbert67 comments

There is a misunderstanding of the difference of rated attractiveness between men and women. Women's attractiveness has a direct correlation with her reproductive capacity, whereas men's attractiveness has more to do with probability of social dominance. That includes confidence, assertiveness, aggressiveness, charisma, and of course height. Some of it is correlated with health, but other factors are not. So there is a big confounder in this study in that many of the factors for a man's attractiveness actually correlates with his potential for success.

> Women's attractiveness has a direct correlation with her reproductive capacity,

Source please.

This was a little harder to find than I expected:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16555779

"These findings demonstrate that female facial appearance holds detectable cues to reproductive health that are considered attractive by other people."

Found via http://asutriplehelix.org/node/99 which also cites some other related papers

EDIT: I really, really enjoy finding cases where something I assumed to be true is questioned on the grounds of scientific correctness. It is always a wonderful opportunity to bring my thinking closer to reality, no matter if my assumptions are true or false.

I'd be a _little_ careful turning "detectable cues" into some kind of axiomatic understanding of attractiveness.

With her 'perceived' reproductive capacity would have been already a bit more palatable.

> Source please.

BOOBS.

I see this is getting downvoted. Will an honest man upvote this back into the black?

The fact is that men place far more value in physical assets than women do. That it is even questioned and needing a scientific study is bewildering.

I'm not sure that size of mammaries correlates with fertility.

> I'm not sure that size of mammaries correlates with fertility.

There is a correlation with estrogen level, nutrients level, and body fat.

>>That it is even questioned and needing a scientific study is bewildering.

The Internet has a lot of white knights.

Oh, come on, how is downvoting a comment consisting of all caps "boobs" with no explanation "white knighting"? It even breaks HN rules for style.

How white-knighting comes into this is beyond me, notwithstanding how much I hate that term in general.

I'm a research scientist for a face recognition company and have done a lot of work with attractiveness estimators and sex classification. I've found that the sex classification score and female attractiveness has a pretty high correlation. I think Alice O'Toole has a paper that has a similar finding although I would have to search for the exact reference.

http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/271/1545/1213

Is this completely conjecture on your part? Or do you have additional studies?

Thank you - what I was trying to say

Very interesting.

The following is completely speculative - I know - but possibly relevant. Bear with me.

I have noticed a difference among investors. There are the engineering/slightly Aspberger's types who tend to be prior founders who exited well. And then there are the HBS hail-fellow-well-met sports-loving never-ran-a-company-but-i-know-im-a-genius types. Yes, huge generalization - but those are the two bins I place them in. My observation in my experience is that the first type seems to be less influenced by attractiveness and appearances than the latter, and make better bets. I mean - take PG or AH. Need I say more? Now, that's not to say the aspy-types are free of biases - not at all - just that they are less likely to be swayed by attractiveness.

In any case, I wonder if other people have observed this effect or whether it's just me.

I think you've added too many constraints to each group you define. You could probably differentiate the groups between those who are theory driven (and who use deep knowledge and understand to guide them) vs. those who are shallower (or using emotional triggers of what excites them, and as such shallow or no theory used when investing).

The investors I've met clump into those two aggregates. I am not imposing any constraints - just saying that the people I've met seem to line up into those categories.

After realizing that I feel like I know what you are talking about, but then realizing that I have only met a couple investors in my life, I think you must be talking about something more general. Perhaps personality archetypes. I think our chosen field attracts these two personality types, which I guess you could say map pretty well to "engineer" and "marketing and sales (business)person". I think the third major category would be the slightly more nebulous "designer", or craft-y/sman type, but I don't know if thats as common among investors.

There is a little bit more color on some of the PR write-ups, see eg

They recruited 60 experienced and affluent backers to view video recordings of 90 randomly-selected verbal business pitches made by entrepreneurs from various sectors at three entrepreneurial contests in the US.

Investors were asked to rate the looks of the entrepreneurs and comment on the pitch.

Researchers found that men who were deemed good looking were 36 per cent more likely to be successful than those viewed as unattractive. However there was no difference for women.

In a separate study they asked investors to listen to the same pitches delivered by a man or a woman.

“We found that male-narrated pitches were rated as more persuasive, logical and fact-based that were the same pitches narrated by a female voice,” the authors concluded. . .

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/10688645/Goo...

I don't have much of a stats background... The first question that jumped to mind is whether or not the quality of the pitch could have affected the perceived attractiveness (could the investors have seen the people with better pitches as more attractive?). Can that sort of thing be controlled for somehow?

Edit: ah, the same pitches were read. Nevermind.

Your original point still stands. It's possible that the men chosen to do the readings just so happened to be better readers/pitchers than the women, even with the exact same script. It's hard to think of a foolproof way to control for that, other than getting a large enough sample and recruiting both men and women of approximately equal experience. Neither of those is a perfect solution, though.

Theoretically, you'd want some way to have the pitches read with precisely the same cadences and intonations, but have the ability to just swap out a female voice for a male voice. One could imagine a computer program which "female-izes" a man's reading, though I doubt anything like this exists in a form which produces a perfectly realistic sounding female voice.

Not the first study who finds appearance to be significant in areas you wouldn't expect it to be:

http://www.nature.com/news/musicians-appearances-matter-more... http://www.forbes.com/sites/lisaquast/2011/06/06/can-being-t... http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2011/08/labour-m...

Not to mention all the jobs where good looks is an explicit requirement such as in modelling, acting or implicit like for waitresses or cashiers in fancy clothing shops. It's a fascinating subject and it is very impressive that we seem to be very close to quantify exactly how important beauty is. Even if it is bad news for ugly people it is better if the facts are out there so something can be done about the problem.

Its been widely observed that attractiveness helps in most interactions, especially sales related, so this is no surprise.

The real surprise should be that female attractiveness doesn't have a significant impact. My initial guess would be that investors, unfortunately, are so dismissive of female pitches that attractiveness can't even help.

It's probably a double bind.

If she's ugly: "Why would you want to fund an ugly girl? Let's get some hotties in here."

If she's attractive: "She's too hot. How could she possibly be a serious hacker / business leader? No one will take her seriously if she looks like that."

Maybe this is too cynical? (I sort of hope so.)

Institutional sexism is certainly a thing.

A nitpick about terms, but not all discrimination against women is 'institutional' sexism. Institutional prejudice may be sufficient but is definitely not necessary for acts of sexism to occur. People are quite capable of acting on innate or pre-learned biases.

It's well known in sales that attractive females have a huge advantage. This is because male buyers will instinctively spend more to show off their power.

Attractive men still have an advantage over unattractive men in terms of persuasion and intimidation.

That's probably why he is surprised that it has no effect here.

Ah yes, I failed to address that. I think there are two things at play here: first is that the "investors" were merely asked to rate, but not actually invest. So their honest opinions can come through. Second is that investors have a little less power disparity (in relative social terms) over founders, so a overt display of wealth isn't likely to work as easily. Could even be considered off-putting.

> The real surprise should be that female attractiveness doesn't have a significant impact.

This isn't at all surprising. That the expectation for women is to look good but not too good, professional but not too professional, etc. is something I've encountered for at least a decade.

> The real surprise should be that female attractiveness doesn't have a significant impact.

There are a number of well-known paradoxes surrounding female beauty. One is that an attractive female defendant in a criminal trial is much more likely to be convicted than a plain Jane, all other factors the same.

From what I have read, attractiveness is highly advantageous for all defendants, except when the crime was attractiveness-related (such as swindle). In the latter case, attractive people instead get harsher sentences.

(See Harold Sigall and Nancy Ostrove, Beautiful but Dangerous: Effects of Offender Attractiveness and Nature of the Crime on Juridic Judgment)

Sounds like a strong case for intentionally skewing investment decisions towards women founders, as if the general population is unconsciously biased towards men, then there are likely many women founders who could generate a great return on investment but who aren't being given the chance to do so.

Unfortunately, value investing in the venture capital world doesn't tend to work out so well, because of the power-law distribution of startup outcomes.

Given the many fits pitched about the female founders conference, women-focused coding programs, etc. can you imagine the storm of indignation that would emerge if it ever became public that a fund was doing this?

It's public. Every woman knows this. Every female startup founder is painfully aware of what this study confirms. They experience this all the time.

I meant a deliberate choice to institutionally favor female founders to correct for what the study (and experience) has shown, which is what the poster above me suggested.

It's a suggestion I actually agree with, but the shitstorm that would ensue...

Sounds like a strong case for intentionally skewing investment decisions towards women founders

It's not. All the study shows is that a bias is present, and that the bias identified in the controlled test is somewhat similar to the skewed results in "pitch competitions."

There's nothing in the paper showing the magnitude of effect this bias has on real-world investment decisions. The evidence you need is a prediction that not only will eliminating this bias improve returns, but that the improved returns are worth any costs associated with eliminating the bias.

PDF Here: https://mega.co.nz/#!QlA0kTgK Decrypt key: i3efFy0wv6R9Qjfw3_XkTUm9aC9Ea9PetMPMX58ogrI

This is unfortunate, and hardly unique to entrepreneurship.

In 'Blink' Malcolm Gladwell describes how orchestras hold blind auditions, with the performers behind screens, to avoid this kind of bias.

Perhaps VC pitches should follow suit.

> Perhaps VC pitches should follow suit.

Question is how to eliminate unwanted bias while keeping the relevant information. With an orchestra audition, it's easy to isolate and evaluate the relevant skill: ability to play the specific instrument.

Anyone got past the login? Apart from the usual methodological checks, I would be interested to know if they controlled for the gender of the investors. Getting more investment if you are more attractive is hardly a surprise, what does surprise me is female attractiveness did not count.

So either we are seeing a genuine, global, cross-society level bias against women (possible), or we are seeing male investors wanting to invest in people they think are like themselves (attractive, successful men) or we are seeing a mislabelling of attractive (George Clooney is intelligent, articulate, methodical and good looking. Matt LeBlanc is just good looking (!)

So if they did what I suspect, got a bunch of male students to rate attractiveness of female entreprenuers and females to rate males, then what I guess is the boys picked the ones with big breasts and did not care if she was intelligent, the girls were more likely to pick "life partner", which includes good looking but also "able to provide".

Weirdly it might be useful to control females choosing "attractive" with their menstrual cycle.

WOw - complicated world I make up at times

From the paper: Study 2 (the gender study). We recruited a nationally representative sample of 521 Americans (46.64% female) over Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (www.mturk.com) to participate in a study.

Nationally representative, assuming the entire nation is on Mechanical Turk?

EDIT: What's with the downvotes? There seems to be some selection bias built in to the sample. If not, please explain.

You can adjust and weight samples. Basic survey methodology.

Getting more investment if you are more attractive is hardly a surprise, what does surprise me is female attractiveness did not count.

We tend to infer intelligence to attractive people. "They are so attractive, I know they must be smart too" (subconsciously, of course). So what might that say?

My first thought was that "affluent people" (investor types) would choose people most like themselves.

And if that means more investors are men who consider themselves decent looking, that means more invested ideas are from men who are above average too.

Another thing not taken into account is differences between the "men delivering the pitch" and "women delivering the pitch". Are the people delivering the pitch equally experienced at presenting? Gender is not the only change when you swap presenters.

From phys.org's summary:

In their first experiment, the researchers recruited 60 actual investors from the business world as volunteers. They asked each to watch videos of people making pitches for a project asking for backing (from actual entrepreneurial contests held across the country). Afterwards the investors were asked to rate how persuasive they felt the people doing the pitch were, and also how attractive they found them. The research team reports that they found that the investors were more likely to choose the male pitchers over those who were female, regardless of whether the content of the pitch was nearly identical. They also found that the more attractive the person giving the pitch, the more persuasive they were found to be—but only for those that were male. The investors didn't seem to care how good-looking the women were, they rated them as less persuasive than their male counterparts regardless.

http://phys.org/news/2014-03-investors-good-looking-male-ent...

Huh? They had someone rate a pitch, then ask if the pitcher was attractive? But then they are asking then same thing - you cannot tease the two apart.

THere seems to be a heap of different issues tied up together here, and this does not seem to be an elegant way of seperating out biases from anyone. I am happy to be wrong but I am not getting good vibes...

> I would be interested to know if they controlled for the gender of the investors

Controlling this might not necessarily be desirable. One of the problem with randomized studies is that it's difficult to show they generalize well. Given investing does not take place in a randomized environment, that investors were representative of real investors is far more important than they be controlled for.

There are four ways, and only four ways, in which we have contact with the world. We are evaluated and classified by these four contacts: what we do, how we look, what we say, and how we say it. -Dale Carnegie

Not much of a surprise, same goes for picking presidents and other political leaders, even CEOs. Charisma has a lot to do with leadership and persuasiveness.

That said, it always surprised me how much of our community seems to at times take pride in the disheveled, socially awkward appearance...as if it's a badge of honor or something. To me, that's just as bad as the dumb jock persona. Why not be well-rounded? Why not take as much pride in our health and appearance as we do in our intellect?

So, all else being equal (the pitch, the idea, etc.) the study found that people looking to invest realize that attractiveness can play a role in the success of the venture.

Since the success of the venture depends upon a lot of sales and marketing of an idea both internally and externally... why is this a surprise?

Investors are worried about the success of the venture and their ROI. They understand that attractiveness can impact it.

paying $10 for this article isn't gonna make me any more handsome

“When there’s an elephant in the room introduce him.” ― Randy Pausch

How is attractiveness evaluated? Because the standards for male attractiveness are very loose and often a great degree its perception is determined by the other factors.

Does anybody have access to the PDF?

I'd be interested in effect size in particular. The abstract only says "profound".

Study 1 - Likelihood of winning pitch competition. Gender and attractiveness:

  Male/High       0.39
  Male/Low        0.29 n=70, p=0.042

  Female/High     0.21
  Female/Low      0.18 n=20, difference not significant

Study 3 - Likelihood of investment on scale from 1 (low) to 7 (high)

  Male/High       5.21
  Male/Low        4.59 p=0.024

  Female/High     4.14
  Female/Low      4.35 difference not significant

  Each participant rated 1 pitch, n=520

http://kristofferr.com/files/PNAS-2014-Brooks-1321202111.pdf

scary, are investors turning as gay? this science survey is very stupid, without qualifying what is attractiveness.

Oh such surprise!

The article should have been titled: Attention seeking paper desperately succeeds at stating the obvious (while keeping a straight face)

It's science. A lot of science is measuring and documenting the completely obvious - because there's a lot of interesting and not-obvious stuff hidden in the obvious.

Because no one on Hacker News has ever questioned whether sexism exists in the startup world.

It's funny to think that in 30 years, there will be a TV show called Mad Geeks ... recounting the tales of the good ol' boys of Silicon Valley. Their sexist ways will be so funny to watch (exaggerated of course ;-)

If this is so obvious, how do people get away with blaming "the pipeline" for their own tendency not to invest in female entrepreneurs?

Oh, I'm buggered then. 6ft6 ugly 116kg monster. Better stick to the day job

Reply on news.ycombinator.com