Winner of the OMT Division Best Paper on Entrepreneurship Award
Network segregation is one of major culprits behind gender-based inequality in entrepreneurship. But while the popular message of “lean in” implies that “outreach homophily”—e.g., women’s tendency to reach out to other women more than to men—is the sole or more responsible factor for such network segregation, “acceptance homophily”—e.g., men’s tendency to accept outreaches from fellow men more—may also or instead be more responsible. These mechanisms are separately examined here in an entrepreneurship accelerator in the northeast US, where budding startup founders (as resource-seeking “mentees”) and seasoned advisors (as resource-holding “mentors”) cultivate interactional ties by sending mentorship requests or accepting them. Although advisors are more likely to form such relationships with same-gender founders, both female and male founders are equally likely to reach out to advisors of either gender. Instead, we find that such network segregation is driven by male (but not female) advisors accepting more outreaches from founders of their own gender. These patterns seem largely explained not by selection but by cultural fit male advisors may perceive as lower when considering outreaches from female founders. The upshot is evidence of acceptance homophily as a sufficient and distinctive mechanism of network segregation in entrepreneurship.