How Gender Stereotypes Affect Innovation

Sarah Thebaud and Amanda Sharkey’s paper (“Unequal hard times  Download “), highlights the role of gender in decisions about entrepreneurial lending through an intriguing puzzle: while gender stereotypes generally assume that women are safer investors because they are–on average–more risk-averse than men, after the 2008 financial crisis, women entrepreneurs were less likely to obtain credit because they lacked an appropriate record of prior lending.

In a brief, 500 word essay, address the general question of how gender stereotypes affect innovation from training and funding to design and production.

In addition to Thebaud and Sharkey’s paper, you may illustrate your argument with examples from the podcast 99% Invisible (剧集：Invisible Women (Links to an external site.)) that deals with Caroline Criado Perez’s work on the gendered design. But you must also use one additional example not provided in either Thebaud and Sharkey’s article or the 99% Invisible podcast.

This will require doing a little bit of independent research on gender, innovation, and entrepreneurship (think of topics close to your interests, for example, women in science/engineering/ women in leadership positions/ women in government and public administration/ the gender of markerspaces, etc.). When using this example, you must include a complete bibliographic reference for it.