If you’re looking for money to start a new business, it helps to be white, male, attractive-looking, and living in a place like Boston or San Francisco. Better still, you want to have gone to a top-ranked university. People with these sorts of profiles win the lion’s share of funding from VC firms.
In 2014, Harvard Business School academic Alison Wood Brooks conducted a series of experiments designed to tease out the biases funders have toward certain groups. She found that male entrepreneurs are 60% more likely to get funding than females, even when women and men are pitching the same idea. Attractive males (as rated by participants) were 36% more likely to be successful than non-attractive males, she found.
