Pitching products as a war or journey: Gender differences in venture capital pitches

Abstract

Previous research (e.g., Koller, 2004) has investigated metaphor framing in business discourse with respect to gender differences and found that a predominance of masculine-associated metaphors, which she attributed to masculine hegemony in the business field. However, this study looked at a discourse in text media and was conducted two decades ago. Given the strides women have made in the past twenty years and the additional opportunities for men and women to gain start-up funds via pitching to venture capitalists, this study explores the extent to which men and women rely on gender-congruent metaphors when pitching a new business. Do men and women choose metaphorical source domains that are associated with historically male-dominated activities (such as WAR or COMPETITIVE SPORTS) when making their pitches or do they rely on gender neutral domains such as JOURNEY? In this study, we examine this question by creating corpora of more than 150,000 words from the videos of venture capital pitches presented in the world-famous DEMO DAY activities and Pitch competitions. A pilot study is conducted based on the pitches collected from the MIT $100K Pitch Competition from 2017-21. We transcribe 520 minutes of recordings from 60 men and 28 women (15,201 words and 6,909 words respectively), and then used MIPVU (Steen et al., 2010) to identify the metaphors and used source domain verification procedures (Ahrens & Jiang, 2020) to determine which source domain they were associated with. We then postulated some source domains as masculinity-oriented (i.e., WAR and COMPETITION), some as femininity-oriented (i.e., PLANT) and some as gender neutral (i.e., BUILDING and JOURNEY). Our preliminary results showed that men used more metaphors with masculinity-oriented source domains COMPETITION (NR=3.62) and WAR (NR=1.97) than women (NR=3.18, NR=1.59). In the men’s subcorpora, the metaphoric concept BUSINESS IS WAR or COMPETITION frequently occurs, addressing a notion that ‘team members need to fight against competitors.’ In contrast, women used more PLANT (NR=1.74) metaphors than men (NR=0.99), emphasizing the growth of the new business, and more JOURNEY metaphors (NR=4.49). These findings show distinctive metaphor patterns manifesting a preference consistent with speakers’ genders. Even in the business field that is entrenched as a male-dominated “arena”, female entrepreneurs appear to be preserving a feminine style of metaphor use, which reifies the gender distinctiveness in contrast to previous studies that regarded men and women as a unified producer group (e.g., Koller, 2004).