Words worth millions? A quasi-replication and extension of gendered linguistic style in German entrepreneurial pitching

Gender-stereotyped languages in pitching affect investors’ evaluation, but their generalizability beyond pitches in natural gender languages, such as English, remains unclear. We replicate and extend the study of Balachandra et al. (2021), which explored masculine and feminine linguistic styles of solo pitchers in English. Using 269 televised equity pitches from Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, we examined the association between gendered linguistic styles and pitch success. As in the original study, women and men differed little in their linguistic styles. However, the original masculine–feminine classification of linguistic features did not reproduce, and gendered linguistic style was not associated with pitch success. Because German, as a grammatical gender language, requires pitchers to make a gendered choice when addressing the audience, we extend the original study to include investor addressing and find that generic masculine addressing is associated with higher odds of pitch success compared to explicit binary addressing. Replication, in this case, invites researchers to move the question from how women and men speak to how gender is built into the labels we use and the ways founders address the audience.