“Women are just outside of those established networks,<br />and if you’re outside the networks, you don’t get the knowledge, you don’t get the opportunities, you don’t get the contacts and you don’t get the funding,” said Susan Coleman, a business professor at the University of Hartford and co-author of the Third Way report.<br />“The problem when you have five white men who all went to the same business school<br />and worked in the same firms is their networks overlap, so they don’t draw from a very wide source of entrepreneurial deal flow,” Mr. Gompers said.<br />Founders of start-ups financed by venture capitalists are almost all male<br />and white or Asian, according to a study by Paul Gompers, a professor at Harvard Business School, and Sophie Wang, a Harvard graduate student.<br />Just 19 percent of top executives are women, according to a LeanIn.org<br />and McKinsey report, and a main reason they don’t rise is because they are less likely to have mentors in senior leadership.<br />The reason, according to the research: People with experience mentor<br />and give money to people like themselves, while those starting out do what they see people like themselves doing.<br />Those who do own companies are half as likely as male founders to employ anyone other than themselves,<br />and they generally earn less in revenue, according to census data analyzed in a new report by Third Way, a think tank.<br />Ninety-one percent are men, 80 percent are white and 16 percent are Asian.<br />Research shows that women around the world are less likely to consider entrepreneurship as a career path, largely<br />because they don’t see other women entrepreneurs as role models.
