Impact of gender language in pitches

Translating Funder Language to Female Founders As someone who has spent time raising and listening to hundreds of other female founders, who struggle and yet persist, I wanted to take a moment to break down some of the coded language we often hear in investor conversations. These comments may seem harmless on the surface, but they’re deeply rooted in subconscious bias, and they hit hard. For female founders, hearing these statements isn't new — but the sting is real. They echo the frustration of being sidelined, misunderstood, or underestimated in rooms where the odds are already stacked. And while knowing you’re not alone might offer some comfort, the bigger ask here is for funders — especially men — to pause, reflect, and share this. Because we can, and must, do better. 🗣️ Common Investor Comments — and What They Mean "Women’s health is a noisy market." ➤ Translation: We’d prefer women to be quieter. We don’t want to see too many of you innovating in the same space. "There’s going to be one big winner in women’s health." ➤ Translation: We don’t truly understand the scale of this opportunity, and we’re treating women as a monolith. "Why would women pay for this?" ➤ Translation: We don’t get female consumer behavior, even though women drive 80% of consumer spending. "You should join this accelerator program — it’ll help you with pitch training (but offers no funding)." ➤ Translation: You’re the problem. Not your idea. You just need to perform better for us, and we still won’t invest. 🧠 The Research Backs This Up A study from Harvard Business Review found that women are disproportionately asked prevention-focused questions (e.g., "How will you avoid failure?") while men are asked promotion-focused ones (e.g., "How big could this get?"). This isn’t just a reason women raise less capital. It fundamentally alters the emotional experience of pitching. Constantly having to defend your ideas rather than talk about your vision creates a long-term toll. It frames women-led companies as risks, not opportunities. 💡 Words Matter. So Does Allyship. If we truly want to shift the landscape for women in entrepreneurship, we need to start with language. Ask yourself: Are you using different metrics or expectations for women founders? Are your questions helping someone build their case, or forcing them to tear down imaginary doubts? Would you ask a male founder the same question? It starts with awareness. It continues with intentional allyship. 📣 To the investors reading this: share it. Talk about it. And most importantly, check your bias. Behind every comment is a choice to support progress or maintain the status quo.

There is a belief that one of the reasons there aren’t as many #women #entrepreneurs is due to #bias against women in general. New research suggests that the problem isn’t necessarily due to bias against women in general per se, but bias against women whose ventures are particularly high in #novelty. Meaning, ventures that are highly novel are rewarded when they are led by #men but punished when led by women. Zhenyu Liao Jack Zhang Nan Wang William Bottom Dirk Deichmann pok man tang do a fantastic job of showing, across both naturalistic and more controlled field experiments that highly novel ventures are seen as violating norms when the entrepreneur is a woman than when the entrepreneur is a man. In one of their studies, they show that #SharkTank judges express more concerns about #normviolations when a woman’s venture is highly novel than when a man’s venture is highly novel. In more tightly controlled studies, they take two ventures that are pre-tested as being highly novel vs. not and use AI-generated voices to manipulate the gender of the entrepreneur giving identical pitches. They find that, just like the Shark Tank findings, highly novel woman-led ventures are seen as more norm violating than highly novel man-led ventures (even though the ventures, in this case, are identical). And whereas novelty might normally be seen as a good thing in entrepreneurship, novelty that is norm violating is not, and given that highly novel women-led ventures are seen as more norm violating, they generate less enthusiasm and obtain lower #funding from potential #investors. What these findings suggest is that it’s not just that people have an issue with highly #agentic women (because to be an entrepreneur, you have to have at least some level of agency) but that they have issues with highly agentic women whose ideas themselves are #boundarybreaking. Whereas breaking boundaries might well be seen as a good thing in most cases, apparently it is not when the person breaking boundaries is a woman. https://lnkd.in/ewtiw2PV

Want to get funded? A lot may be in the way we answer questions during a pitch. “Women can partly close the funding gap by giving promotion-focused answers to prevention-focused questions”. This is Sciences Po's key takeaway from a study aptly titled: We ask men to win and women to lose: Closing the gender gap in startup funding by Dana Kanze, Laura Huang, Mark A. Conley and E. Higgins. This study has been game-changing because from it, we gained actionable insights. What are actionable insights? They are insights based on data analysis which provide specific recommendations for taking tangible actions, which in turn will lead to results. In this specific case, it was found that men were consistently asked more ‘promotion’ questions (highlighting upside and potential gains), while women were asked more ‘prevention’ questions (highlighting potential losses and risk mitigation). Those who addressed promotion questions raised at least 5 times more. From this insight, here are some recommendations on how to modify the way we pitch to improve our chances of successfully raising: 👉 Be prepared to defend against criticisms because female founders and our presentations are subject to more challenges and pushback compared to our male counterparts. 🚀Bring them back to potential gains. 👉Anticipate the negative and prevention questions by addressing them in a slide, which you could include in the Annex, or doing so orally. Then 🚀bring them back to potential gains. 👉If prevention questions are happening during your presentation, consider it a sign to refocus the conversation. Emphasize the positive and 🚀 bring them back to potential gains. 👉Always arm yourself with objective data and 🚀 bring them back to potential gains. This last one is important: bringing them back to potential gains and emphasizing the positive is only effective if it is backed by objective data. And while things are slowly starting to change, as the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) writes: "In the short term, the reality is that women entrepreneurs must work within the flawed system even as they lobby to improve it." So if you, like me, are raising, let’s leverage everything to our advantage. There are many studies, articles and experts with decades of experience and data. Let’s transform this information into actionable insights to change our fundraising strategy and succeed. Let’s get funded! Links to two summaries of the study in the comments: one concise summary from Sciences Po and an article from the study's authors in the Harvard Business Review, however there are many more. If you would like some examples of how to answer prevention questions with promotion answers tell me in the comments. What was your pitching experience like? #fundraising #femalefounders #pitching - Follow me, I write about being an entrepreneur in France, scaling up @Monthlee parenting while founding a startup, and the gender gap. Always be raising, investors, DM if interested.