Can Business Accelerators Level the Playing Field For Female Entrepreneurs? A Two-Sided Matching Approach Suggests Yes

Abstract

Business accelerators provide startups with mentorship, networks, and training. They have rapidly emerged as prominent players in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. We argue accelerators are especially helpful for female entrepreneurs and may level the playing field for women in the venture market. We leverage a novel two-sided matching framework that controls for both sorting and selection and find that 1) women-founded startups are given, on average, lower company valuations during the for-profit admission process and therefore less likely to be admitted, however
2) conditional on graduation from accelerators, there is no evidence that women-founded ventures have a lower probability of receiving venture financing or being acquired. Our findings suggest that accelerators could improve returns by investing in more women-founded startups.