Gender, ethnicity and entrepreneurship in initial public offerings: illustrations from an open database

This paper describes the variables in a freely available database of all emerging growth firms (EGF) that made an initial stock offering (IPO) on US public markets from 1990 through 2010. Our expectation is that researchers from a variety of disciplines can use this data to answer a wide variety of social science questions and combine it with other databases. To illustrate how the data can be used, we describe the gender and nationality of the top management teams (TMTs) and board of directors (BoDs) of these firms. We confirm that women are under-represented in all functional positions, but, in contrast to much of the popular press, we find that statistically Silicon Valley firms perform better than the national average. Gender ratios differ by function with women most prevalent at the CFO position and are most prevalent in the biomedical industry. Using undergraduate education, as an identifier for nationality, we find that, contrary to the popular press, there are more European than Asian immigrants in the TMTs. This suggests that European immigrants are more likely to immigrate with advanced degrees, while the Asian immigrants have only Bachelor’s degrees. In the immigration literature, it has been observed that specific immigrant groups concentrate in particular occupations. To test for this effect, we study the backgrounds of all identifiable Taiwanese immigrants. A remarkably high concentration of Taiwanese TMT members were from two Taiwanese universities’ electrical engineering departments, then received U.S. graduate degrees, particularly from UC Berkeley, and entered semiconductor-related industries. This database will contribute to reproducible social science as the same quality-controlled data is now available to all researchers.