More women who pitch on Shark Tank get the deal – Shark Tank Analysis Part I

Ever since Shark Tank aired in 2009, I have been a fan of the show – from the varied business ideas that get pitched, the background stories of the presenters, to the deals that get made or not made. After several seasons of watching the show, I became curious about certain statistics such as the actual number of females vs males that come to pitch, how many people of color pitch and get deals, what industries gets the most deals, how many of those that got deals shed some tears, etc.

I was thus glad to find a full Shark Tank dataset being kept and maintained by angel investor, Halle Tecco – bit.ly/STankData. With the dataset, I was thus able to explore some of my curiosities. As there are many, I will explore them over two posts. With the first post, I will look at gender distribution, focusing on the eight seasons that are complete. Season 9 is currently ongoing and the analysis below will be updated to reflect that once its completed.

The number crunching was done using R programming, and I have made the R script available on github.

So what did the analysis reveal?

As expected, men constitute the biggest proportion of the presenters: 

Looking at all the eight complete seasons, a total  of 707 ideas and businesses have been pitched. Of those, 422 were made by Males, 177 by Females, and 108 by a Mixed team.

This trend is apparent from season to season, where we also observe that the show has been having a higher number of seasons since the first three seasons. More specifically, season 2 had the lowest with 36 presenters, while seasons 5, 6, and 7 had the highest with all a total number of 116 presenters each.

Naturally, with the higher proportion of Males in the show, majority of the deals also go to men:

As shown in the figure above, the highest number of females to receive deals were observed in seasons 1 and 2, with 37%. Mixed teams were highest in season 5, at 23% of the total presenters.

 

Looking at those who got deals, on a good note, more women who pitch get the deal in comparison to males:

Considering just gender specific categories, the data reveals that:

– Out of 177 females that pitched, 99 got the deal (56%)

– Of the the 422 males that pitched, 211 got the deal (50%)

– Similarly to females, 56% of the mixed teams that pitch get a deal (61 out of 108).

 

The ‘Food and Beverage’ industry has the highest number of presenters:

There are several Industries that are represented on the show and I am always interested to see if there are gender differences in the fields that men and women pitch in. Overall, among the 707 presentations, ‘Food and Beverage’ and ‘Fashion and Beauty’ had the highest representation with 20.8% and 19,8% respectively. The lowest fields represented were ‘Automotive’, ‘Green and CleanTech’,  ‘Travel’, and ‘Business and Services’  with 0,99%, 1,41%, 1,41%, and 1,84% respectively.

Notably, Men tend to pitch in ‘Food and Beverage’ and ‘Lifestyle and Home’ industries, while Women are more in ‘Fashion and Beauty’ and ‘Food and Beverage’:

Results reveal that 19,4% (82 of 422) and 16,4% (69 of 422) of males pitched in the ‘Food and Beverage’ and ‘Lifestyle and Home’ industries. While 31,6% (56  of 177) and 22% (39 of 177) females in ‘Fashion and Beauty’ and ‘Food and Beverage’ industries respectively. Similarly, mixed teams were mostly in 24,1% (26 of 108) ‘Food and Beverage’ and 19,4% (21 out of 108) in ‘Fashion and Beauty’.

Notably, no females are recorded to have pitched in the Green and Clean Tech and Automotive fields.

As I work in Tech and constantly hear and observe the low female representation in Tech fields and startups, I was interested to see how this fact is reflected in the Shark Tank data. The data revealed first that the ‘Software and Tech’ industry is fifth in the list of the most presented in industry for men and  8th for women. For some reason, I thought the industry would be higher on the list.

Moreover, of the total females that pitch, 3,39% pitch in the ‘Software and Tech’ industry, while 9,24% of the males pitch in that industry. Roughly half of those who pitched in the Tech field got deals irrespective of gender.

 

********  That’s it for Part I  ********

The above results will be updated to also reflect incoming data for Season 9.

Stay tuned for Part II, where I will explore other factors such as how many people of color have pitched and got deals from season to season.


Also published on Medium.