NEWS AND INSIGHT
FEMALE ENTREPRENEURS SHOWN TO FACE DISCRIMINATION FROM THEIR OWN EMPLOYEES COUNTRY: Denmark SCHOOL: Copenhagen Business School
Last month, we celebrated International Women’s Day – a day that provides a chance to reflect on how far we have come as a society, but one that is also a reminder of how much things still need to change. With this in mind, a new piece of research from Copenhagen Business School has found that female entrepreneurs not only face discrimination from external stakeholders but that they also face discrimination from their own employees. Researchers recruited 500 online workers via an online employment marketplace. They were told they would be image coding to help a new tech start-up build a database of pictures and that they would be paid $1 for every eight to 10 minutes of work. At the end of the shift, workers were asked if they would be able to do additional work for no pay. Exactly half of these workers were willing to work extra when they thought they worked for Matthew and Joe, but this proportion was only 40 per cent among those who thought they were working for Amanda and Chloe. The study follows on from another experiment in which full-time employees were found to have contributed fewer regular hours and less overtime to female founders compared to male founders, creating a gender productivity gap of seven per cent. In both cases, the results show that female entrepreneurs must pay more than their male counterparts for the same work, which could make all the dierence between success and failure at a small start-up. Associate professor at Copenhagen Business School Vera Rocha conducted the study, published in Organization Science, with colleagues from London Business School and the University of Oregon. Speaking about the gender productivity gap, Rocha said: “If this happens in real workplaces, this may translate into dierences in the number of clients you get on board, how many units you sell or how fast you can enter a new market.” EB
Ambition APRIL 2023 | 9
Made with FlippingBook - Share PDF online