
CeFEO counts more than 50 scholars and 30 affiliated researchers. Several studies and reports have consistently identified CeFEO as a leading research environment worldwide in the area of ownership and family business studies.
This research project, has been co-authored by the following CeFEO Members.
Spotlight highlights research-based findings only. If you’re interested in exploring this project further or delving into the theoretical and methodological details, we encourage you to contact the authors or read the full article for a comprehensive understanding.

Genedy, M., Naldi, L., Hellerstedt, K., & Wiklund, J. (2026). Scaling With Bias? The Role of Founders’ HR Knowledge and Experience in Hiring and Managerial Appointments. Human Resource Management.
https://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.70056

Spotlight is an innovative online family business magazine designed to bridge the gap between cutting-edge research and the real-world needs of practitioners, owners, and policymakers. Drawing on the latest findings from the Centre for Family Entrepreneurship and Ownership (CeFEO) at Jönköping International Business School, Spotlight delivers insightful, accessible summaries of key research topics. Our mission is to keep the family business community informed and empowered by offering actionable insights, expert analyses, and forward-thinking strategies that enhance business leadership and ownership practices for long-term success.
Spotlight is generously supported by the WIFU Foundation, which promotes research, education, and dialogue in the field of family business. This partnership enables us to continue bridging academic insights and real-world practice for the advancement of responsible family entrepreneurship and ownership.
Scaling is supposed to be the moment a venture “levels up”—more customers, more employees, more managers, more structure. But Genedy, Naldi, Hellerstedt, and Wiklund argue there’s a catch: when growth gets intense, founders may lean on mental shortcuts to make hiring and promotion decisions quickly—and those shortcuts can quietly amplify gender stereotypes. Using rich Swedish register data on thousands of new ventures, the authors show a consistent pattern: as ventures scale, women become less likely to be hired and less likely to be appointed to managerial roles. The hopeful twist? Founders who bring HR education (and, to a lesser extent, HR experience) can reduce those negative effects—suggesting that “people know-how” is not a soft extra, but a scaling capability.
Many growth stories celebrate speed: hiring sprees, rapid restructuring, new layers of management. Yet the human side of scaling is messy. Founders face time pressure, uncertainty, and constant tradeoffs—exactly the conditions where people tend to rely on heuristics (mental shortcuts) rather than careful, consistent evaluation.
This paper focuses on a “scaling paradox”: ventures need talent more than ever during scale-up, but the same urgency can push decision-makers toward biased shortcuts. The authors highlight gender as a particularly “available” cue in decision-making, often standing in for assumed competence or leadership fit—even in contexts that are relatively gender-equal.
Rather than treating gender bias as something that mainly happens in old, tradition-heavy organizations, the study asks a sharper question: Can bias actually intensify as brand-new ventures scale? And if it does, what helps founders avoid it?
The authors test their ideas with matched employer–employee register data in Sweden, which allows them to link founders, firms, hires, and managerial appointments over time.
The main analyses focus on new ventures founded and led by solo male founders in Sweden (2004–2018), chosen to isolate specific gendered mechanisms in decision-making.
Their final samples are large enough to pick up meaningful patterns in real hiring behavior, not just stated intentions:
Instead of defining scaling as “any growth,” the study treats scaling as a substantial positive deviation from a venture’s prior growth trajectory—capturing moments when firms accelerate beyond what their history would predict.
The authors also stress-test the scaling concept using alternative measures (including binary “scaling stage,” and faster “hyper-scaling” definitions) and find the core story holds up across operationalizations.
The proposed buffers against bias are:
The logic is straightforward: HR knowledge and experience can provide founders with structured tools (e.g., competency-based selection, structured interviews), making them less likely to “wing it” under scaling pressure—and therefore less likely to default to stereotypes.
The headline result is uncomfortable: scaling reduces the likelihood that women are hired into job positions and appointed to managerial positions.
Importantly, this isn’t presented as a tiny statistical quirk. The paper interprets the magnitude in practical terms:
At the firm level, these repeated decisions accumulate into measurable composition shifts (e.g., percentage-point declines in women employees and women managers within the same firm over time).
A core contribution is distinguishing what helps—and what helps less.
The study finds that founder HR education mitigates the negative effects of scaling on both (a) female hiring and (b) female managerial appointments.
The effect sizes are meaningful: founders with HR education experience a sizable increase in the odds of hiring a woman (and a smaller but still positive increase in appointing women as managers) under the same scaling conditions.
Why might HR education matter so much? The authors’ argument is that formal HR knowledge offers frameworks and routines that are easier to apply under pressure—especially when new ventures don’t yet have the internal capacity to build sophisticated systems while scaling (“Penrose effect”).
Founder HR job experience also helps, but more selectively:
That difference matters in practice. It suggests that even if founders become more balanced in general hiring, the “step up” into leadership may remain shaped by deeper stereotypes about who “looks like” a manager.
The paper doesn’t stop at “bias exists.” It tries to unpack how scaling conditions can produce it.
One pathway is representativeness: under time pressure, founders may judge candidates by how closely they match a mental prototype of the “ideal worker” or “ideal manager”—and those prototypes are often gendered.
Another pathway is availability: when scaling, founders may hire or appoint from their networks because it’s faster. But if networks skew male, women become less cognitively “available,” compounding disadvantage even when women are qualified.
Together, these mechanisms paint a coherent picture: scaling pushes founders toward speed; speed increases reliance on shortcuts; shortcuts amplify bias—unless a founder has the tools to slow the decision down without slowing the company down.
The simplest practical implication is also the most strategic: founders shouldn’t treat HR structure as something you add once the company is “big enough.” The study suggests the opposite: the scaling moment is precisely when structured people-processes become risk controls—not just efficiency tools.
If your venture is entering a high-growth phase, ask: Which decisions are becoming more frequent and more rushed?Those are the decisions most likely to drift toward heuristics.
Speed doesn’t have to mean chaos. The paper’s argument about HR knowledge points to a specific design principle: create simple, repeatable routines that are quick to run but hard to bias.
Examples that align with the study’s logic:
This is consistent with the authors’ emphasis that HR frameworks help founders rely on objective criteria rather than intuitive judgments under pressure.
A key nuance is that HR experience helped female hiring more reliably than female managerial appointments.
So if you’re watching gender diversity metrics, don’t stop at overall hiring shares. Track:
In other words: watch the “glass ceiling” while you’re still building the building.
If scaling increases reliance on networks, and networks are skewed, then “culture fit” and “people we know” become bias multipliers.
A practical countermeasure is to intentionally diversify sourcing channels before the growth surge:
These ideas flow directly from the availability-heuristic evidence: scaling magnifies disadvantage for female candidates when founders hire disproportionately from male-dominated networks.
This study reframes gender bias as not only a cultural problem, but also a scaling systems problem. Bias isn’t presented as purely intentional discrimination; it can arise from perfectly “reasonable” founder behavior under time pressure—choosing speed, familiarity, and mental shortcuts to survive the pace of growth.
That matters because it implies bias is preventable through design. If scaling amplifies heuristics, then scaling strategy should include the mechanisms that counter heuristics: structure, routines, accountability, and better decision architecture.
The authors also acknowledge limitations and future directions, including the Sweden-specific context (high gender equality overall but male-dominated private sector) and the need for complementary methods (e.g., interviews, surveys) to capture nuanced decision processes behind register patterns.
If you’re a founder (or advising one) planning to scale, treat this as a “pre-mortem” for people decisions:
Notably, the authors recommend building professional HR systems that are equal across genders (standardized protocols, clear promotion criteria, transparent evaluation) and encourage prospective entrepreneurs to develop HR-related experience as part of foundational preparation.

CeFEO counts more than 50 scholars and 30 affiliated researchers. Several studies and reports have consistently identified CeFEO as a leading research environment worldwide in the area of ownership and family business studies. This research project, has been co-authored by the following CeFEO Members.
Spotlight highlights research-based findings only. If you’re interested in exploring this project further or delving into the theoretical and methodological details, we encourage you to contact the authors or read the full article for a comprehensive understanding.

Genedy, M., Naldi, L., Hellerstedt, K., & Wiklund, J. (2026). Scaling With Bias? The Role of Founders’ HR Knowledge and Experience in Hiring and Managerial Appointments. Human Resource Management.
https://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.70056

Spotlight is an innovative, AI-powered, online family business magazine designed to bridge the gap between cutting-edge research and the real-world needs of practitioners, owners, and policymakers. Drawing on the latest findings from the Centre for Family Entrepreneurship and Ownership (CeFEO) at Jönköping International Business School, Spotlight delivers insightful, accessible summaries of key research topics. Our mission is to keep the family business community informed and empowered by offering actionable insights, expert analyses, and forward-thinking strategies that enhance business leadership and ownership practices for long-term success.
Spotlight is generously supported by the WIFU Foundation, which promotes research, education, and dialogue in the field of family business. This partnership enables us to continue bridging academic insights and real-world practice for the advancement of responsible family entrepreneurship and ownership.