Recent Research: Website diversity shown to attract more prospective entrepreneurs

A recent research study suggests that diverse identity representation of website spokespeople increases the likelihood of attracting a higher proportion of prospective entrepreneurs.

Rosanna Garcia and Daniel Baack, researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and the University of Denver respectively, explore whether the demographic of spokespeople featured on websites had an impact on the entrepreneurial intention of individuals of various identities. Their article, Entrepreneurial Intent Is Not Black or White: An Intersectional Perspective, sampled 562 students across five American universities to gain insight into this issue. The goal of the study was to isolate and cross-examine individual and compounded impacts of race and gender in both the website spokesperson and student respondent in order to identify ways to encourage more diverse entrepreneurial involvement in university settings.

Garcia and Baack’s experiment entailed student respondents of a variety of races and genders viewing different versions of a website, each version specifically tailored to a particular race and gender. The researchers measured respondents’ propensity to participate in entrepreneurship on their college campus, which they codified as entrepreneurial intention, or EI. It is important to note that variable ‘EI’ in this study was confined to entrepreneurial activities within the respondents’ respective universities. Therefore, the conclusions are not reflective of company creation and other entrepreneurial efforts. Nonetheless, this piece of research contributes to understanding how the intersection of race and gender can influence entrepreneurial propensity.

The study concludes that:

• Independently, the racial identity of website spokespeople did not make a statistically significant difference to respondents’ EIs;
• Independently, the gender of website spokespeople did not make a statistically significant difference to respondents’ EIs;
• Combined, incongruency of race and gender between the respondents and the website spokespeople yielded the most positive influence on respondents’ EIs.

This is good news for female and racially diverse prospective entrepreneurs because they are entering a time where role incongruence stereotypes are becoming less of a barrier to entry. The overarching outcome of the study is that a wide diversity of website spokespeople is most encouraging to the largest number of students to explore campus entrepreneurship activities.

While this study is limited to university activities, large-scale trends could be extrapolated as an indicator of American entrepreneurship as a whole. Organizations trying to attract the greatest proportion of prospective entrepreneurs may want to consider mirroring a diverse population through the images on their site.