Asymmetrical Returns to Entrepreneurial Prominence : How Established Firms Sustain the Gender Gap in High-Growth Technology Entrepreneurship

Organizational scholarship documents how established firms’ entrepreneurial prominence—their propensity to produce entrepreneurs—affects workers’ access to entrepreneurial opportunity. We extend this conceptualization to roles within firms, and assess the extent to which occupying them catalyzes venturing for women versus men. Specifically, we leverage 30 million LinkedIn resumes to track the career trajectories of female and male technology workers who exit wage employment. To discern high-growth entrepreneurship from other forms of business ownership, we trained a machine learning classifier using the founding statements of venture-backed entrepreneurs, and applied the classifier to LinkedIn profiles in which workers claimed to engage in entrepreneurship. By identifying high-growth ventures at their point of origin, we are able to account for startups that failed soon after initiation, thereby addressing the issue of endogenous sampling on the dependent variable. The base rate of founding a high-growth technology venture in our sample is 0.6%. Overall, women are 52% less likely to become high-growth founders. Women who occupy an entrepreneurially prominent position are 19% more likely to venture than women who do not. However, men who do so are more than twice as likely to venture as men who do not. Accordingly, the gender gap in venturing is greatest among women and men who depart wage employment from entrepreneurially prominent roles in established firms: A transition rate of 0.56% for women and 1.55% for men. We discuss the implications of our results, particularly regarding public policy initiatives designed to increase the pool of high-growth female founders