Internal Venture or External Founding? Organizational Determinants of Gender Differences in Technology Enterprise

Women launch new ventures at a much lower rate than men. However, evidence regarding the presence of a gender gap in intrapreneurship—that is, entrepreneurship within organizations—remains elusive. This is a significant omission, given the value that firms appropriate from intrapreneurship and the extent to which it provides an alternative career path for incipient founders. Accordingly, drawing from gender essentialist and career mobility perspectives on entrepreneurship, we motivate competing hypotheses regarding the existence of an intrapreneurial gender gap. To adjudicate between these accounts, we supervise a machine learning classifier with descriptions of venture-backed startups from Crunchbase. We then apply this classifier to a sample of LinkedIn resumes belonging to 1,616,881 technology professionals and observe their career trajectories, in order to identify instances of enterprise within and beyond established organizations. We replicate a gender gap in entrepreneurial transition, but find that the intrapreneurial gender gap is not meaningful, and is attenuated beyond statistical significance in a matched sample that achieves covariate balance between women and men, while the entrepreneurial gender gap remains effectively unchanged. Moreover, consistent with the career mobility perspective, we observe that women’s intrapreneurial propensity is responsive to internal opportunity structures. Specifically, it is amplified in firms where internal mobility is abundant and attenuated in firms where it is scarce. Our results challenge the essentialist account of stable sex differences in enterprise, because the intrapreneurial activity that our classifier identifies is equivalent to the type of entrepreneurial activity that venture capital firms fund. One implication is to invite a conversation about the utility of solutions to the gender gap in entrepreneurship that rely on essentialist diagnoses