Fairly assessing unfairness: An exploration of gender disparities in informal entrepreneurship amongst academics in business schools

Abstract

• First used of the “pair matched” technique to compare female and male academics. • First quantification of a leaky pipeline of informal entrepreneurship for both genders. • Women are less numerous to be involved in informal entrepreneurship. • Most female academics follow a progressive path in their entrepreneurial journey. • Female academics struggle to move to remunerated entrepreneurial engagements. Assessing gender disparities in science commercialisation has been in the centre of the unresolved debates on the inadequacies of the methods used to compare female and male academics. Drawing from the literature on non–IP-based academic entrepreneurship and gender disparities in science, this study used the “pair-matched” technique to isolate 406 female and male academics in business schools (203 of each gender from a sample of 729 academics) who share common characteristics regarding academic position, subdisciplinary affiliation, and experience. The study confirms that a comparison of female and noncomparable male academics could lead to an unfair judgement of female academics’ performance. However, the results show that even compared to comparable men, women are less involved in remunerated consultations, generate a smaller proportion of their revenue from consultations and are less engaged in the creation of consultancy companies. In addition, the study allows us to quantify a leaky pipeline of both genders involved in informal academic entrepreneurship and to identify four paths, from progressive to nonprogressive. Most female academics follow a progressive entrepreneurial path but often struggle to move from nonremunerated to remunerated entrepreneurial engagements. The study concludes with implications for university administrators on knowledge transfer and gender inequality.