Swiping left on leaders

Xiumei Li had a friend who had been on the dating scene for a while.

He’d been seeing an impressive woman, a startup founder building a successful business. She was a good conversationalist. She was interesting.

She sounded great. So why didn’t it work out?

Some gentle prodding revealed he was intimidated by her, but also felt that “there was a gap between what he expected for a partner versus what this female entrepreneur had to offer,” Li says.

The proverbial light bulb switched on.

Li is a researcher and an assistant professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Manitoba’s Asper School of Business and wondered if there might be something here worth studying. She started reading media articles and watching roundtable discussions featuring female founders talking about being single and struggling to find partners.

Li wondered: are men less likely to pursue relationships with female entrepreneurs?

“Both this friend anecdote and the media discussion prompted us to think more about this phenomenon,” she says.

Li, along with fellow researchers Di Tong (Nottingham University, Ningbo, China) and Haemin Dennis Park (University of Texas at Dallas, Texas), did a deep dive into the journals to see if there was already any good literature on the topic. They found that while the professional barriers female entrepreneurs may face were represented, there were very few papers focused on the personal ones.

“We wanted to see if there was something similar or complementary in the personal or private life domain, and that’s why we started this project,” Li says.

The project was composed of two field experiments and one survey experiment, the results of which were published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Business Venturing under the heading A Romantic Penalty? Female Entrepreneurship and Relationship Initiation in Online Dating.

For the first field experiment, the researchers used AI-generated portraits to create identical female profiles of users looking for long-term relationships and marriage on one of China’s largest online dating platforms. Not only did the women in the profiles look the same, they had the same age (26, two years younger than the average age of marriage in China), height, income and education.

The only thing different was their job title: a company owner versus a company manager.

“Then we sent contact messages to male users on this platform, and then we just waited to see if any of those people responded, or if they didn’t,” Li says.

The team received institutional ethics approval for the experiment and did not disclose to the men swiping that these profiles were fake. Those who “swiped right” and were interested in the fictitious profiles were not engaged with further, or “ghosted,” which happens on dating sites all the time.

What they found: men were more likely to “swipe left” — or disregard — the profile of the entrepreneur.

“We found that there’s a statistical difference. If we focus on the female entrepreneur profile, we actually received very few, very limited replies compared to the other profile, which is manager,” Li says.

Manager and entrepreneur were intentional choices, as both are considered less “feminine” professions, Li says.

“But even in this case, we still see entrepreneurship has a disadvantage,” she says.

In the second field experiment, everything about the profiles remained the same, except “manager” was swapped out for three different — and more feminized — professions: primary school Chinese teacher, nurse and florist.

“Again, the female entrepreneur is disadvantaged, so they receive fewer responses from those male users of the platform,” Li says.

The florist profile is also an entrepreneur — she owns her flower business — but because that profession is seen as more “feminine” and “life-oriented” than, say, that of the founder of a cyber security tech startup, Li says, the florist did not seem to be at a disadvantage compared to the growth-oriented entrepreneur.

In the survey experiment, researchers made two profiles: a growth-oriented entrepreneur and a teacher. They then asked male participants open-ended questions about whether or not they would initiate relationships with these women.

While the male participants in the survey agreed that both careers are time demanding, there was a noted difference in perception.

“They think entrepreneurs voluntarily prioritize work, so they spend a lot of time on their business instead of family or life. But for teachers, they agree that teachers have a time-demanding job, but they believe that teachers will involuntarily devote time to their job,” Li says.

The language used about the women was also revealing.

“We found that they compliment female entrepreneurs, using words like ‘independent’ and ‘accomplished.’ For teachers, they usually use ‘understanding,’ ‘kind,’ and ‘family or child-oriented.’”

The word “domineering” came up for both professions, but with a critical difference. “They believe domineering is a personal trait for female entrepreneurs, but for teachers, they would say that it’s more associated with, let’s say, an authoritative classroom role instead of being a pervasive universal personality trait,” Li says.

She underscores that this research isn’t meant to discourage women from being ambitious or founding their own companies; it’s to better give a full accounting of the challenges they might face in all spheres of their lives.

“I think the most important contribution of this study is to (the) literature. We do see papers talking about the business domain challenges that female entrepreneurs face — and also the challenges that married female entrepreneurs face balancing work and life. So we look at single entrepreneurs and see their challenges and their experiences,” she says.

She hopes that it can also help move the needle in terms of how female entrepreneurs are viewed culturally.

“We need to do something to help people understand that ‘female entrepreneur’ is not a label — it’s not a trait. There is diversity among female entrepreneurs.”

There was one demographic of men, however, who preferred female entrepreneurs: male entrepreneurs.

“I think that’s one positive thing out of this,” Li says with a laugh.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com