Equal Opportunity and Venture Capital
Closed. This professor is continuing with Fall 2024 apprentices on this project; no new apprentices needed for Spring 2025.
Despite the enormous impact of the Venture Capital (“VC”) industry—it has helped anoint the world’s four most valuable companies—there is effectively no legal backstop that ensures non-dominant groups (e.g., women and Black people) have an equal opportunity to share in its wealth creation and innovation. Furthermore, while many VCs have pledged efforts to increase investment in founders from non-dominant backgrounds, racial disparities persist. Nominal diversity efforts in VC investing may be obscuring how seemingly routine practices such as the use of control terms (contractual terms that limit the control of founders) in contracting contribute to these disparities. The central research questions in this project ask: whether investment in founders from non-dominant groups, though pro-diversity, comes with a level of control that White founders do not regularly experience? And how might social dominance motivations explain such disparity in their application? To answer these questions, this project develops and validates a novel implicit measure of social dominance orientation to be administered to diverse samples--college students, American adults, and VC employees--as they make contracting decisions. It also analyzes race differences in the frequency and severity of control terms of a 700+ sample of series A contracts (the first significant round of venture capital financing) involving VC firms that range in their diversity commitments.
Role: This project uses data-science to scrape and analyze VC websites and code these VC contracts for racial disparities. Students will specifically have interest in and experience with data-science practices, law and business contracts, and diversity policy. Undergraduate research apprentices will facilitate in coding data, data entry and analysis, as well as participate in project meetings. Apprentices may also take part in other activities within the Culture, Diversity, and Intergroup Relations lab, which is located in the Berkeley School of Law.
Qualifications: We are looking specifically for students with interest in and experience with data-science practices, law and business contracts, and diversity policy. Additionally, undergraduate research apprentices are expected to have excellent skills in organization and time management, be detail-oriented, reliable, and able to work well with others. Commitment to the lab for more than one semester is desirable. A number of majors and programs are particularly relevant to this study (e.g., Psychology, Education, African American Studies, Chicana/o Studies); however, we will consider and encourage applications from any major. Time commitment per week is approximately 9-12 hours but can be negotiated.
Day-to-day supervisor for this project: Kyneshawau Hurd, Ph.D. candidate
Hours: to be negotiated
Off-Campus Research Site: All work will take place remotely.
Related website: https://www.law.berkeley.edu/our-faculty/faculty-profiles/victoria-plaut/