Although women account for only 17.8 percent of the participants in college venture competitions, they win the greatest amount of prize money, according to a report titled “The Entrepreneurship Talent Gap” that was released by the Greenwich-based nonprofit Girls with Impact.
The report analyzed college venture competitions over the past five years and found that a lopsided disparity in female participation, more than half of the winning teams had at least one woman as a team founder, while 60 percent were solely founded by a woman and 40 percent had a woman as its chief executive. Among the teams to earn cash prizes for first, second and third place finishes, 53 percent had a woman founder and 35 percent had a woman as chief executive.
“The bottom line: it pays to have women on your team,” said David Noble, executive director of the Entrepreneurship & Innovation Consortium at the University of Connecticut and co-author of the report. “Too many biases exist with the assumption that women aren”™t as good as men. This is another nail in the gender bias coffin.”
