Does Gender Diversity Attract Investors? It Depends.

Based on research by Alessandro Piazza (Rice Business) and Dana Kanze (Georgetown)

Key takeaways:

• Gender diversity on founder or mentor teams alone does not engage investors.
• Rather, investors engage more when founder and mentor teams share the same gender composition — whether they are gender-diverse or male-dominated.
• The strongest investor engagement occurs when gender-diverse founder teams are paired with gender-diverse mentor teams.

For early-stage startups, gaining access to investors is a persistent challenge — one that accelerators like Techstars tackle by pairing founders with mentor teams who can help shape and advance fundraising efforts.

But even within accelerator programs, investor attention remains limited and competitive. To stand out and gain serious attention, startups rely on cues that signal quality and innovation. Increasingly, gender diversity on founder teams has been treated as one such cue, often taken as a signal of stronger decision-making and broader perspectives.

That assumption, however, treats gender diversity as a signal investors read from founder teams alone. It assumes that investor judgments are formed by looking at who is on the founding team, independent of the broader relationships surrounding it. 

In accelerator programs, investor engagement is mediated through founder-mentor relationships, which raises a different question: Do cues like gender diversity operate the same way when investor attention depends on interactions between two different teams?

In other words, if mentors shape investor relationships, gender diversity on founder teams alone may not carry the same weight. 

New research tests this question. Co-authored by Alessandro Piazza of Rice Business and Dana Kanze of Georgetown, the study analyzes data from 984 startups that participated in Techstars accelerator programs worldwide. By combining investor data with interviews, the researchers examine how gender diversity shapes investor engagement when founders and mentors work as paired teams rather than in isolation.

Published in Organization Science, the paper finds that gender diversity, on its own, does not enhance investor engagement. Instead, the research shows investor engagement improves when founder and mentor teams are aligned in their gender composition — meaning both teams are either gender-diverse or male-dominated. When gender diversity appears on only one side of the founder-mentor relationship, the investor advantage disappears. 

“A common assumption is that diversity on its own should help teams stand out,” Piazza says. “What we find instead is that diversity matters in context. When founder and mentor teams are aligned, mentorship works better — and that translates into more investor interest and funding success down the line.”

That assumption did not come out of nowhere. Much of this expectation about diversity is rooted in what researchers call a “threshold” view of gender diversity. Decades of organizational research suggest that once teams reach a critical mass of representation, diversity becomes substantive rather than symbolic, improving decision-making in complex environments.

From there, it becomes easy to assume that diverse teams are not only stronger internally, but also more attractive externally. In accelerator settings, at least, Piazza and Kanze show that this assumption does not hold. Simply reaching a commonly cited diversity threshold on a founder team or mentor team does not, on its own, lead to greater investor engagement.

Investor engagement improves when founder and mentor teams are aligned in their gender composition — meaning both teams are either gender-diverse or male-dominated.

Instead, investor interest increases only when founder and mentor teams are aligned in their gender composition. Whether teams are gender-diverse or male-dominated, alignment between the two sides of the relationship is associated with higher investor engagement. 

The strongest effects appear when gender-diverse founder teams are paired with gender-diverse mentor teams. “When gender-diverse teams are aligned, they seem better positioned to realize the benefits of diversity,” Piazza says. “Together, they can draw on broader perspectives and networks without the frictions that tend to surface when founders and mentors are mismatched in terms of gender composition.”

The advantage, Piazza notes, is not that investors observe or reward alignment directly, but that alignment improves how mentorship works in practice, influencing investor engagement later on.

Notably, the study focuses on investor engagement rather than funding outcomes — a distinction that matters, since attention and conversations do not always translate directly into capital. 

Even so, the findings open several avenues for future research. Because the analysis centers on accelerator programs, an open question is whether similar alignment effects appear in other settings where internal teams work closely with external partners, such as advisory boards, consultants or strategic alliances. The study also focuses on gender composition at the team level, pointing to future work that could examine how other dimensions of identity or expertise shape dynamics between teams under resource constraints. 

More broadly, the study suggests that research on diversity may benefit from looking beyond individual teams to the relationships that shape how work actually gets done — particularly in settings where access to resources depends on coordination and sustained interaction. 

Written by Scott Pett

Kanze and Piazza (2026). “When Do Gender-Diverse Teams Engage More Investors? Evidence of Threshold Alignment Benefits at Techstars,” Organization Science.