Employee Surveillance, Startup Contests, and More – Boston News
Let’s explore some of the most interesting stories that have emerged from Boston business schools this week.
The Surprising Effects of Employee Surveillance – Questrom School of Business Blog
BU Questrom School of Business professor Michel Anteby recently co-authored new research that explores the ways in which increased surveillance of employees can lead “to workers’ strikes and sometimes even quitting their jobs altogether.”
The article points to a 2011 experiment where TSA managers installed cameras to monitor officers “as an attempt to stop the disappearance of baggage in airports.” According to TSA officers, they felt they “as though their managers were merely looking for a reason to discipline them.”
New BU research finds that workplace scrutiny often leads to a worse work environment, even if it is inadvertently / Photo via bu.edu
According to Anteby’s research, “under such scrutiny, one tends to lose sight of the bigger picture, which ends up with employees feeling undervalued and over scrutinized.”
You can read the full article here.
These 12 European Startups Are Using Technology to Improve Opportunities For Low-And Middle-Income Workers – MIT Sloan Newsroom
The MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy’s Global Inclusive Innovation Challenge announced its 12 European finalists, all of which are working to improve economic opportunity for workers. According to the article, “the competitors are judged on vision, impact, participation, and scalability.”
Initiative Director Erik Brynjolfsson writes, “If we employ inclusive innovation globally, it could be the best thing that ever happened to humanity. We can have more wealth, better health, and widely held prosperity.”
According to the article, the European finalists will travel to “Darmstadt, Germany, in early September, where they will pitch their ideas at a regional competition. The winner of each category then goes on to compete in November during the Global Grand Prize Gala at MIT. The gala includes four $250,000 prizes, one for each category.”
The 12 European finalists, organized by category, are as follows:
Skills Development and Opportunity Matching
- Data4You, an all-ages coding boot camp.
- Jobiri, which “assists people with finding jobs through an AI-driven career adviser.”
- micro:bit, which “provides tiny programmable computers for students and teachers.”
Income Growth and Job Creation
- ABURY’s “Design meets Craft” connects “designers and artisans through a digital platform to find creative project partners, and connect with the global market.”
- mecasa is an “online platform connecting caretakers with senior individuals who need daily support.”
- ProGlove is a “smart glove designed to scan and streamline manufacturing and logistics work.”
Financial Inclusion
- hiveonline is a “mobile platform offering small- and micro-businesses administrative help and access to financial services.”
- Trezeo, which “provides a mobile financial platform for independent workers.”
- Sherpa, which “offers insurance to people who are self-employed, freelancers, contractors, and other entrepreneurs.”
Technology Access
- BLITAB, a “tactile tablet designed for blind and visually-impaired users.”
- Pangea Electronics “builds sustainable and eco-friendly technology.”
- Teqmine Analytics uses “AI to help customers with their research and development questions.”
You can read more about the event here.
Think You’re Having a Heart Attack? If You’re a Woman, Insist on a Female Physician – Harvard Business School News
New PNAS research co-authored by HBS Associate Professor Laura Huang, along with the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities’ Brad Greenwood and Washington University in St. Louis’ Seth Carnahan finds that of “more than 500,000 heart attack patients admitted to hospital emergency departments in Florida between 1991 and 2010, female patients treated by male physicians were less likely to survive than patients of either gender treated by female physicians or male patients treated by male physicians.”
Moreover, “survival rates among female patients treated by male physicians improved with an increase in the percentage of female physicians in the emergency department and an increase in the number of female patients previously treated by the physician.”
In “Patient-Physician Gender Concordance and Increased Mortality Among Female Heart Attack Patients,” the researchers write:
“These results suggest a reason why gender inequality in heart attack mortality persists: Most physicians are male, and male physicians appear to have trouble treating female patients. If female patients tend to be more challenging for male and female doctors to diagnose and treat, the patterns we document may reflect the fact that the most skillful physicians (i.e., female physicians) provide the highest return to their skills when treating the most challenging patients (i.e., female patients).”
You can read more about the research here.
Do Women Entrepreneurs Get Less VC Funding? Wharton and Columbia Researchers Find a Large Gender Gap
Over the last few years, there has been a lot of talk about more women in business. From the promotion of organizations like the Forté Foundation—which seeks to enhance women in business—to CNBC claiming “the Golden Age for women entrepreneurs has finally begun,” enterprising women seem to be everywhere. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that the deck is stacked in their favor. In fact, researchers from Columbia Business School and The Wharton School found the opposite was true.
The Gender Gap in Startup Funding
In a paper published in the Academy of Management Journal titled, “We Ask Men to Win & Women Not to Lose: Closing the Gender Gap in Startup Funding,” researchers looked at how women fared compared to men when they were trying to get funding for their startups.
After reviewing footage from the TechCrunch Disrupt startup competition, the researchers found that women were asked entirely different types of questions about their companies compared to their male counterparts. Men received more questions about their project’s potential for growth, while women received questions on the opposite end, about their potential risks and losses. This difference in questioning had a measurable impact on the funding each startup received.
The research paper, written by Dana Kanze (a Columbia Business School Ph.D. student), Laura Huang (a Wharton School Professor), Mark A. Conley (a Columbia Psychology Ph.D.), and E. Tory Higgins (a Columbia Psychology Professor), sought to delve into the enormous gender gap revealed in venture capital funding. According to the paper, only 2 percent of VC funding goes to women entrepreneurs in spite of the fact that women own 38 percent of U.S. businesses and represent 7 percent of venture capital firms.
One of the keys to this drastic difference in funding was how VCs—both male and female—framed funding questions for women-created businesses. Kanze explained the thought process in a Forbes article.
“According to the psychological theory of regulatory focus, investors adopted what’s called a promotion orientation when quizzing male entrepreneurs, which means they focused on hopes, achievements, advancement, and ideals,” Kanze said. “Conversely, when questioning female entrepreneurs, they embraced a prevention orientation, which is concerned with safety, responsibility, security, and vigilance.”
Inside the Research
To study how this difference in questioning impacted women and men entrepreneurs, the research team reviewed the Q&A sessions of 189 startup entrepreneurs—12 percent of whom were women—held by 140 prominent venture capitalists—40 percent of whom were women. Using software to analyze each session, researchers discovered that 67 percent of questions posted to men were promotion-oriented while 66 percent of questions posted to women were prevention-oriented.
In the end, the study found that this difference in questioning led to a huge difference in VC funding. Among comparable companies, the research team found that businesses that were asked prevention-oriented questions raised (on average) $2.3 million in funds in 2017, while their promotion-focused counterparts raised $16.8 million—nearly seven times more.
“In fact, for every additional prevention question asked of an entrepreneur, the startup raised a staggering $3.8 million less, on average,” Kanze told Forbes. She continued, saying, “Controlling for factors that may influence funding outcomes—like measures of startups’ capital needs, quality, and age, as well as entrepreneurs’ past experience—we discovered that the prevalence of prevention questions completely explained the relationship between entrepreneur gender and startup funding.”
However, there was some good news. For female entrepreneurs who received prevention-focused questions but responded with promotion-type answers, they were able to raise $7.9 million, versus $563,000. This suggests that regardless of how VCs phrase their questions, entrepreneurs can recover much of their funding potential if they answer in the positive.
To test their findings, the research team conducted an experiment that recreated the TechCrunch Disrupt conditions with 194 VCs—30 percent of whom were women—and 106 entrepreneurs—47 percent of whom were women. After removing startup specific details, the team asked the VCs to allocate $400,000 to their chosen entrepreneur.
According to the Kanze in a Harvard Business Review article, the team found that: “Angel investors allocated an average of $81,113 to startups in the prevention question, promotion answer condition—1.6 times larger than the $52,369 average allocated to those in the prevention question, prevention answer condition. Similarly, ordinary investors gave an average of $96,321 to the prevention question, promotion answer condition—1.7 times larger than the $55,377 average given to the prevention question, prevention answer condition.”
Speaking with Professor Laura Huang
To gain additional insight into the results of the research paper, we spoke with Professor Laura Huang at the Wharton School. Here’s what she has to say.
- What was the most surprising result that came out of your study?
“It was surprising that both men and women investors were equally as likely to ask prevention-focused questions to women, as opposed to promotion-focused. It wasn’t that men were the only ones biased, but that both genders were equally as likely to be biased.”
- Do you have any advice for female entrepreneurs looking to raise venture capital?
“Stop it in its tracks. When you see something like this happening, stop it immediately and redirect the response so that you’re making yourself on equal footing. Don’t allow that train of thought to go through where you’re getting asked prevention-focused questions and investors are focused on the risk. Answer the question that’s asked but redirect your response toward possibilities and success.”
- How do you think VC funding can change for the future to close the gender gap?
“Part of it is an awareness on the investors’ side. It’s also up to the entrepreneurs to redirect each question toward the right focus. A lot of this gap is implicit. Investors don’t realize they’re asking prevention-focused questions of women; they just automatically ask certain questions to each gender. Awareness around the tendency toward prevention-focused questions for women entrepreneurs and a focus on redirection toward promotion is key.”
