Getting in the Door vs. Winning It All: How Gendered Outcomes Change Across Evaluation Stages in Entrepreneurship

Research has consistently found that organizational evaluations produce gendered outcomes. We advance understanding of this inequality by examining how multistage evaluations—a common organizational design feature—shape gendered evaluative disparities. We integrate and extend research on evaluations, status, and inequality to theorize how gendered outcomes can vary between stages within a single, unified evaluation process—what we term “stakes-driven gender inequality.” Our theoretical framework centers on a ubiquitous feature of organizational multistage evaluation processes that is missing from prior theoretical accounts: escalating stakes across stages via increasingly binding commitments and rising cost of wrong selections. We conceptualize two stylized stages within the same evaluation process: a shortlisting stage (a preliminary selection of candidates for further consideration) and a winners stage (in which final, binding selections are made). Using data from a large multistage startup competition, we test our theory and find that female-led startups are 18.7 percent more likely than male-led startups to be selected in the shortlisting stage but 30.7 percent less likely to be selected in the winners stage. Mechanism tests in the shortlisting stage are most consistent with female-led startups being assessed as higher quality, whereas in the winners stage, we find evidence consistent with gendered performance expectations and evaluators’ risk aversion.