Scaling With Bias? The Role of Founders’ HR Knowledge and Experience in Hiring and Managerial Appointments

Authors:
Mohamed Genedy, Stockholm School of Economics/Jönköping University
Lucia Naldi, Jönköping University/Halmstad University
Karin Hellerstedt, Jönköping University
Johan Wiklund, Whitman School of Management, Syracuse University


Journal:
Human Resource Management (2026)


Summary:
When new ventures scale rapidly, male founders increasingly rely on gender stereotypes in hiring and promotion decisions—but founders with HR education or prior HR experience significantly reduce this bias.


Research Questions:
1. Does new venture scaling increase gender bias in founders' hiring and managerial appointment decisions, reducing the likelihood of women being hired or promoted?
2. Does the founder's formal HR education mitigate the negative effects of scaling on female hiring and female managerial appointments?
3. Does the founder's prior experience working in organizations with established HR functions mitigate these negative effects?


What We Know:
Scaling ventures must hire and promote rapidly, but the pace and uncertainty of scaling can push founders to rely on cognitive shortcuts—heuristics—that amplify susceptibility to gender stereotypes. Prior research shows that "think manager—think male" biases shape employment decisions even in gender-equal contexts. Yet scaling has been overlooked as a specific trigger for gender bias, and the role of founders' HR knowledge as a mitigating factor has never been examined. This matters for the millions of workers hired into high-growth ventures and for the entrepreneurs building them.


Novel Findings:
Using linked employer-employee census data covering all solo male-founded new ventures in Sweden from 2004–2018 (224,970 job hirings; 28,617 managerial appointments), the study finds that a one standard deviation increase in scaling reduces the odds of hiring a woman by 18% and appointing a woman to management by 22%. Founders with HR education increase the odds of female hiring by 33.5% and female managerial appointment by 14%, fully mitigating the bias. Prior HR experience mitigates the effect on hiring (10% increase in odds) but not on managerial appointments. Mechanism tests show both representativeness and availability heuristics drive these patterns.


Originality/Value:
The study operationalizes scaling as the deviation between a venture's observed and predicted growth trajectory, estimated via a GMM dynamic panel data model. This approach is robust across industries and captures structural organizational transformation. The full-population census design with firm-level fixed effects and extensive robustness testing provides unusually high internal and external validity.


Implications for Practice:
Founders planning to scale should pursue formal HR training and establish structured, bias-resistant hiring protocols before the scaling phase. Accelerators and incubators should integrate HR curricula to help founders build diverse talent pipelines at the moment they need talent most.


Implications for Policy:
Policymakers and venture support programs should recognize scaling as a critical window for gender inequality. Incentivizing HR professionalization among scale-ups and requiring structured hiring practices in publicly funded programs can reduce the "diversity debt" that accumulates during rapid growth.


Implications for Society:
Scaling ventures are among the most important engines of job creation, yet they systematically disadvantage women in hiring and leadership. This study shows that gender inequality in high-growth contexts is not inevitable—it is shaped by founder knowledge and can be mitigated through education and professionalized HR practices.


Implications for Research:
The study identifies scaling as a neglected context where gender bias intensifies, contributing to the literatures on gender in entrepreneurship, HRM in entrepreneurial ventures, and the consequences of scaling. Future research should replicate findings across national contexts, extend analysis to compensation and retention, and examine how founding team composition moderates these dynamics.


Full Citation:
Genedy, M., Naldi, L., Hellerstedt, K. and Wiklund, J. (2026). Scaling with bias? The role of founders' HR knowledge and experience in hiring and managerial appointments. Human Resource Management.


Abstract:
New ventures are expected to continuously add new jobs and managerial positions to meet the expanding demands of scaling. However, the rapid pace and inherent uncertainty of scaling often lead founders of new ventures to rely on heuristics when making these critical hiring and managerial appointment decisions. By integrating research on scaling, cognition in decision-making, and gender stereotypes with literature on HR practices, we argue that such heuristics can exacerbate reliance on gender stereotypes rather than the actual competencies of potential candidates. Using matched employer-employee census data covering all new ventures established and led by solo male founders in Sweden between 2004 and 2018, we find that scaling decreases the likelihood of hiring females for job positions and appointing females to managerial positions. However, the founder's HR education mitigates these negative effects on both female hiring and managerial appointments, while the founder's HR experience only mitigates the negative effects on female hiring decisions. We also tease out the invoked mechanisms, conduct post hoc tests, and run an extensive number of robustness tests.