Does gender representation in white paper's pictures affect the success of initial coin offerings?

Details

Supervisors

Thewissen, James

Faculty

Louvain School of Management

Degree label

Master [120] : ingénieur de gestion, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

This research paper aims to explore the possibility of a relationship between the gender depicted in ICO white paper pictures and its success. Indeed, prior literature found that gender representation in documents can have different effects on the viewer. Considering a patriarchal society, woman pictures mostly tend to emit a submissive portrayal and sexual arousal by the viewer side while man pictures are associated with dominance and competency. We manipulated a sample of 1023 ICOs with information about gender pictures available in their white papers. Our results reveal that a higher number of pictures depicting a man alone is associated with a lower amount raised by the ICO while pictures representing one woman alone have also a small significant correlation with the natural logarithm of the amount raised. The results also suggest that a higher proportion of men in the ICO project team is related to lower appetite from investors. However, as the models used in the research are not really fitting the data, we conclude that the findings should be read with care and can only be used as a starting point for future research on ICO team gender diversity and gender pictorial representation in ICO white papers influences on investors.