Asper School of Business research shows female entrepreneurs face a dating disadvantage.
It started with a piece of gossip.
Xiumei Li was listening to her friend’s latest foray into dating. He had been dating a female entrepreneur.
“He was impressed in many aspects,” said Li. “But at the same time, he shared that he felt somewhat intimidated, and he decided not to pursue that relationship.”
Of course, as an Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Asper School of Business, Li started asking questions. Why was he intimidated by a female entrepreneur? What was the underlying issue behind his hesitation?
Published in the prestigious Financial Times 50-ranked Journal of Business Venturing, “A romantic penalty? Female entrepreneurship and relationship initiation in online dating,” examines these questions.
Li co-authored this article with Di Tong (Nottingham University, Ningbo, China) and Haemin Dennis Park (University of Texas at Dallas, Texas, USA).
Li and her co-authors devised a series of experiments to examine whether men were less inclined to pursue relationships with female entrepreneurs.
Investigating, they looked to one of China’s largest online dating platforms, where users seeking long-term relationships often weigh every part of a potential match’s profile, from their looks, to their taste in music, to their occupation, before deciding whether to pursue someone by swiping left (discarding a profile) or right (liking a profile).
Li and her team created fictitious female profiles using AI-generated photos (the study received institutional ethics approval). Across the experiments, the profiles differed only in occupation. “Otherwise, they looked the same, earned the same amount of money, and had the same educational background,” Li said.
Those other occupations included managers, teachers, and nurses. But still, Li found that female entrepreneurs—particularly those pursuing growth-oriented ventures such as tech—were less likely to be “swiped right” upon compared to the similar women in other occupations.
Li’s article is an important step forward for research on female entrepreneurs. Women remain underrepresented in entrepreneurship, but her research broadens the conversation by suggesting that the challenges they face aren’t just in the boardroom.
“The goal of the research isn’t to discourage women from becoming entrepreneurs. It’s to better understand the barriers they may encounter, so we can eventually address those barriers,” Li said.
On a lighter note, one small silver lining came out of the research, and is worth mentioning for its rom-com potential. One group was especially receptive to female entrepreneurs: male entrepreneurs. Birds of a feather…you know the rest.
You can read the full text of "A romantic penalty? Female entrepreneurship and relationship initiation in online dating" at this link.
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