Lakshmi Balachandra, now a professor of entrepreneurship at Babson College, traversed this cultural divide when she worked at two venture capital firms—one mostly male, the other mostly female—in the late 90s. While at the male firm, occasionally entrepreneurs would assume she was an assistant, she said, or they would ask her out in the middle of meetings. But mostly, the firm's partners, "didn't know what to do with me. Like they were a little more formal," she said.

"Did it feel like they were trying really hard not to be sexist?" I asked.

"Yeah," she said. "That's a perfect way to put it."

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One of the biggest reasons more women don’t start businesses is that female entrepreneurs have a more difficult time raising money. The Kauffman Foundation notes that, "For male entrepreneurs, 60 percent of startup funding was raised from outside sources, such as bank loans or angel investors, compared to 48 percent for women entrepreneurs. Women entrepreneurs are recipients of just 19 percent of angel funding and even less of venture capital funding.” A 2014 Babson College report similarly found that, although things are getting better, companies with a female CEO only received 3 percent of total venture capital dollars in the previous two years.

Fiona Murray, the associate dean of innovation at the MIT Sloan School of Management, recently conducted an experiment in which participants evaluated a video pitch from a new company that used slides, an identical script, and either a male or female voice-over. The male voice was 40 percent more likely to receive funding, as Murray wrote in the Boston Globe. “In a follow-up experiment, we found that evaluators particularly favor pitches from attractive men, and that attractive women do worse than unattractive men and women,” she added.

Sarah Thebaud, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California Santa Barbara, decided to try to determine why this gender gap in startup funding persists. In three experiments, she tested what a group of 178 college students thought about a series of business plans, and indirectly, the gender of the business owners behind them.

The study, published last month in the journal Social Forces, was conducted with two types of business plans: an “innovative” one and a “non-innovative” one. The non-innovative business was a new iteration of a model that’s been proven to work before (a typical wine store), while the innovative one presented an entirely new idea (a store that provides customers the ingredients, tools, and guidance to make and bottle their own wine.)

“Most businesses tend to replicate others that are similar—one pizza place may be a little different from another, but basically they’re all serving the same thing,” Thebaud explained in an article about the study in a UCSB publication. Thebaud presented the subjects with the same innovative and non-innovative business plans, but she manipulated the gender of the business owner, listing it as either Laura, Julie, David, or Jason.