When Empathy Becomes a Liability in Startup Funding
How warmth, founder archetypes, and investor heuristics distort who gets funded
I want to start with a truth statement, because this topic gets muddy fast.
I’m not a founder who has pitched VCs and been penalised for “being too soft.” I can’t tell that story honestly.
What I can tell you is this. I’ve experienced gender bias in my personal and professional life. I’ve felt the subtle stuff. The interruptions. The double standards. The way confidence gets interpreted differently depending on who’s speaking.
And during my MBA research into gender and startup funding, I found something that made a few things click into place.
It’s not only “investors don’t back women.”
A chunk of the pattern looks like this.
Investors don’t fund businesses. They fund a story about the founder.
Across the research, a pattern shows up often enough to matter. In some pitch settings, when founders signal high warmth, collaboration, relational leadership, and listening before selling, then those cues can be misread as:
Lower agency.
Lower ambition.
Lower scalability.
Not because warmth is bad leadership, but because it can clash with the dominant founder template. A template that’s coded as decisive, certain, and forceful. [1]
That doesn’t replace gender bias. It helps explain one mechanism that makes it persistent.
To be clear. Many investors actively value empathy, coachability, and customer obsession. The issue is that under high uncertainty, some rooms still default to a narrow founder archetype, and warmth can be interpreted through that lens rather than on its merits.
The Story We Tell, and What it Misses
The headline story is familiar. Women get less funding. The gap is stubborn. It shows up even when you try to control for “quality” in the usual ways. [2]
So if your starting point is “gender bias in funding is real,” I’m with you.
But here’s where it gets more interesting, and more uncomfortable.
The bias isn’t only about who you are.
It’s also about which leadership behaviours get interpreted as “venture scale.”
What I Mean by “Feminine-Coded Behaviour.”
I’m not saying these traits belong to women. They don’t.
I’m talking about behaviours our culture tends to label as “feminine” or “soft,” whether they’re shown by a woman or a man.
Things like:
being warm and relational
talking about collaboration and shared wins
showing humility
centring community, customers, team
listening before selling
And on the flip side, the behaviours that often get coded as “masculine”:
dominance and certainty
bravado
big claims about conquest and scale
effortless confidence, even when the evidence is thin
The issue isn’t warmth versus competence. The issue is that under uncertainty, people use behavioural cues as proxies. When the proxy is biased, it can systematically misread warmth as weakness and dominance as capability. [3][4]
The research points to something more specific than “men are this, women are that.”
The investment world has a mental template of the “real entrepreneur.” That template skews masculine, and it shapes what gets rewarded. [3]
If you match it, you often get tailwinds. If you don’t, you may have to do more work to make competence legible, even when the fundamentals are strong.
What the Research Actually Shows
One of the strongest insights across this literature is that the assumption “women underperform” is not a reliable explanation for the funding gap. Instead, founders get evaluated through stereotype-shaped lenses, even when outcomes do not justify those beliefs. [3]
Two findings really matter here.
1. Warmth can change how your pitch gets interpreted
Balachandra and colleagues found evidence that investors penalise “feminine” pitching styles independent of the entrepreneur’s gender. Same behaviour, different vibe, different evaluation. [1]
Read that carefully. The penalty is not about women only. It’s about how certain behaviours get interpreted when investors are matching you against the “movie in their head” of a venture-scale founder.
If a man pitches with warmth, humility, and relational language, he can be penalised too. If a woman pitches in a stereotypically masculine way, she may avoid that specific penalty. She can still trigger a different problem, like social backlash for violating gender expectations. [4]
This is why simplistic advice like “just be more confident” is often unhelpful.
The issue is not confidence. It’s the narrow range of founder performance that gets coded as investable.
2. The questions you get shape the story you’re allowed to tell
Kanze and colleagues showed that investors tend to ask men more promotion-oriented questions (upside, growth, winning) and women more prevention-oriented questions (risk, loss, protection). Those patterns predict funding outcomes. [5]
That matters because questions shape the narrative arc.
If you keep getting downside questions, you spend your pitch defending risk rather than claiming upside.
If you keep getting upside questions, you spend your pitch painting a bigger future.
Same founder. Different room. Different outcome.
The Double Bind, and Why Women Still Get Hit Harder
At this point, a smart sceptical voice might say: “Okay. If the bias is against feminine-coded behaviour, doesn’t that mean it’s not really gender bias?”
I don’t think that holds up.
Even if the penalty can hit anyone, women are more likely to be expected to show warmth and punished socially if they do not. At the same time, the entrepreneurial archetype rewards decisiveness, dominance, and certainty.
So women can get squeezed from both sides. That dynamic shows up in the broader sociological work on status beliefs and how stereotypes shape evaluations in entrepreneurship. [4]
This is part of what makes the gap persistent.
It’s not only a pipeline problem. It’s not only a “more women in the room” problem. It’s a template problem. A perception problem. A pattern recognition problem.
How Bias Shows Up in the Room
Bias doesn’t always sound like bias. It often sounds like “instinct.”
“She doesn’t have founder energy.”
“He’s got presence.”
“I’m not sure she can scale.”
“He’s the kind of person who can sell.”
This is where the behaviour penalty becomes practical. Warmth can change the kinds of questions you get, the confidence the room feels, and the story you’re allowed to tell. That shift can compound into funding outcomes. [5]
Research also suggests growth expectations themselves can be gendered. Founders can be slotted into different “scale stories” based on stereotype shaped assumptions. [6]
This is where “warmth” can become strategically tricky. Not because warmth is bad leadership, but because it can be interpreted as lower agency. Lower ambition. Lower scalability.
A necessary pause. Are we accidentally telling women to “pitch like men”?
This is the moment where this topic can go sideways.
The takeaway is not “pitch like a man.”
The takeaway is that the default founder template is narrow. If you don’t match it, you often have to do extra work to make competence legible. Investors should tighten their decision hygiene. Founders should translate their strengths into signals that the room cannot easily misread.
A better takeaway is this.
Investors should get more honest about their heuristics.
Founders should get more strategic about making competence legible, without abandoning who they are.
The ecosystem should widen the archetype of what a high-performing founder looks like.
Because when empathy gets marked down, it doesn’t only narrow opportunity for women; it narrows the range of leadership we recognise as investable.
A sceptic might say, “Maybe that’s just preference, not bias.” But when preferences systematically track stereotypes rather than performance, they become a predictable distortion in how capital gets allocated.
What This Means for Founders
If you’re a founder reading this, here’s the part I want you to take without swallowing the poison.
If you’ve felt pressure to harden your edges, you’re not imagining it
There are real perception dynamics at play that can penalise feminine coded behaviours. [1]
You don’t need to become someone else. You do need signal clarity
This is about translation, not transformation.
A practical way to think about it:
Keep the empathy, and tie it to a concrete advantage. Retention. Trust. Sales cycle. Clinical adoption.
Keep the collaboration, and make your decision points unmistakable. What you decided. Why. What you cut.
Keep the warmth, and lead with agency. A clear claim. A clear plan. Clear numbers.
If the room is biased toward “masculine” signals, you’re reducing the chance they misread you.
Treat investor fit like founder market fit
Some investors will always overweight confidence performance. Some will value substance and execution.
You’re allowed to choose aligned capital.
What this means for investors
If you’re an investor, or an emerging angel investor, this is where it gets personal.
Because this bias is cultural. It can show up in anyone’s judgement if we’re not careful. And, it’s not about good or bad investors. It’s about how fast pattern recognition can become a shortcut, and how shortcuts can drift into bias.
Three concrete moves:
1. Standardise your questions
Kanze et al. suggests question framing is not neutral, and it shapes outcomes. [5]
Try a simple discipline. Every founder gets:
one upside question
one risk question
one execution question
one market insight question
2. Audit your “founder presence” heuristic
When you feel “not sure about this person,” ask what you’re reacting to.
Is it clarity.
Is it traction.
Is it credibility.
Or is it “they don’t fit the movie in my head.”
3. Treat empathy as a signal, not a weakness
In most companies, trust and execution are built through listening and strong stakeholder management. If we treat those behaviours as “less venture scale,” we misread capability.
The Point of This Piece
I’m not trying to win an argument about whether gender bias exists. The evidence says it does. [2]
I’m trying to sharpen our understanding of how it operates, because you can’t fix what you can’t name.
If the real issue is that we reward one narrow founder archetype, then “more women founders” alone won’t solve it.
We have to widen the template.
We have to stop confusing bravado with competence.
We have to stop treating empathy like a liability in the very companies that depend on human trust, human behaviour, and human systems.
If you’ve seen this play out, as a founder, operator, investor, or partner, I’d love to hear how it showed up. Because this is pattern recognition, we can actually do something with it.
Author Spotlight
We’re so grateful to Sinéad Fitzgerald for allowing us to share her story here on Code Like A Girl. You can find her original post linked below.
If you enjoyed this piece, we encourage you to visit her publication and subscribe to support her work!
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Article Sources
[1] Balachandra, L., Briggs, T., Eddleston, K., Brush, C. (2017). Don’t Pitch Like a Girl!: How Gender Stereotypes Influence Investor Decisions. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 43(1), 116–137. DOI: 10.1177/1042258717728028.
[2] Ewens, M., Townsend, R. R. (2020). Are early stage investors biased against women? Journal of Financial Economics, 135, 653–677. DOI: 10.1016/j.jfineco.2019.07.002.
[3] Malmström, M., Voitkane, A., Johansson, J., Wincent, J. (2018). [VC gender constructions and] performance facts(Journal of Business Venturing Insights). DOI: 10.1016/j.jbvi.2018.01.002.
[4] Thébaud, S. (2015). Status Beliefs and the Spirit of Capitalism: Accounting for Gender Bias in Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Social Forces, 94(1), 61–86. DOI: 10.1093/sf/sov042.
[5] Kanze, D., Huang, L., Conley, M. A., Higgins, E. T. (2018). We ask men to win and women not to lose: Closing the gender gap in startup funding. Academy of Management Journal, 61, 586–614. DOI: 10.5465/AMJ.2016.1215.
[6] Martiarena, A. (2022). How gender stereotypes shape venture growth expectations. Small Business Economics, 58, 1015–1034. DOI: 10.1007/s11187-020-00431-y.
 | A guest post by
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Thank you for amplifying my article, @Code Like A Girl. I’m fascinated by the irony that even in the tech industry, that prides itself on innovation, women and non-binary folk are so often encouraged to perform a more “masculine” version of themselves. The system rewards the “mask”, not the feminine intelligence underneath.
I’d love to hear whether your readers feel this too, and how/if they push back.
This is such a powerful, well written piece. I’ve been told multiple times that I have a ‘warm’ communication style. Never given much consideration to that feedback, but I certainly will now.