Different, but same: A power law perspective on how rock star female entrepreneurs reconceptualize “gender equality”

Prior studies investigating new venture emergence and growth from a gender-based lens have consistently found that, on average, female-founded ventures underperform their male-founded counterparts. In this study, we draw from the power law perspective to suggest that these findings primarily originate from the way researchers treat the outliers, those observations far from the normal. We hypothesize that the best of the best (i.e., the Rock Star) founders and ventures of each gender will have equally stellar performance. Contrary to the majority of entrepreneurship studies that consider outliers as ‘‘problems’’ that must be removed or transformed, the power law perspective assumes that outliers are different, have differential effects by skewing distributions far to the right, and are likely the most interesting and influential cases in the population. We leverage semi-parametric methods on longitudinal data from a representative sample of nascent entrepreneurial ventures to demonstrate the gender effect on outlier vs. non-outlier categories. Our findings suggest that gender does, in fact, negatively affect non-outliers (i.e., “average” entrepreneurs), while having no impact on outliers. We show that compared to the majority of the population, those with outlier inputs—resource endowments, expectations for future growth, and engagement—have a greater likelihood of achieving outlier outcomes, regardless of their gender. Our study contributes to the domain's inclusive understanding of women entrepreneurs and female-led ventures, and to the growing theoretical interest in the emergence of star performers.