Swimming or Sinking in the Shark Tank…Does Gender Matter?

There are gender imbalances in the deals made on Shark Tank, but that doesn’t mean the Sharks are sexist.

My brother and I are big fans of Shark Tank. After watching a few episodes together on vacation recently, I started to wonder whether it’d be possible to identify any patterns in the way Sharks make deals on the show. For instance — are male Sharks more likely to make deals with men than women? Or, for that matter, are male entrepreneurs more likely to make it on the show in the first place? With a few of these questions in mind, I started looking for the data I’d need to come up with answers.

Collecting the data

As I suspected, I wasn’t the first to ask these sorts of questions about Shark Tank. In a post on Quora, Halle Tecco described her own detailed analysis of the show. Amongst other insights, Halle found that across the first six seasons of the show, the two female Sharks (Barbara Corcoran and Lori Greiner) made a larger percentage of their deals with women than their male counterparts.

Halle made the data she collected available online. Due to a lack of information in the dataset on entrepreneurs with non-binary gender identity, I only used male and female labels in my analysis.

Posing the question

It’s worth noting that the number of men and women appearing on the show is not equal: the ratio of all-male teams to all-female teams is roughly 70/30.

I was curious to see how each Shark’s funding probabilities might look after accounting for this skewed ratio. As I thought through different ways to measure this effect, I kept asking myself the same question — what percentage of pitches from either gender did each Shark make a deal with?

I needed a bit more data to be able to answer my question. Luckily, there is a Wikipedia page that provides short descriptions of each Shark Tank episode. I used Beautiful Soup to scrape the attendance records for each of the main Sharks on the show. By combining Halle’s deal data with the attendance records I collected, I was able to determine how often each Shark made deals with the male and female entrepreneurs they heard pitches from.