The 'Visibility Risk Scale'
The Visibility Risk Scale was developed by Lisa Bean as part of her 2025 Masters dissertation in psychology: From Purpose to Action: The Psychological Impact of Group Mentorship in Improving Self-Efficacy and Perceived Risk Readiness in Early-Stage Women Entrepreneurs.
The scale measures a psychological construct introduced for the first time in this research: visibility risk, defined as the perceived social, reputational, and evaluative threat of being publicly seen as an entrepreneur.
Unlike existing measures of fear of failure or general anxiety, visibility risk specifically captures the experience of showing up publicly – posting, pitching, selling, and speaking – as an entrepreneur, and the evaluative threat that comes with it.
The 12-item scale was designed to measure visibility risk across key dimensions including fear of judgement, performance anxiety, avoidance, social rejection, psychological safety, rumination, identity discomfort, fear of public failure, self-comparison, delegated visibility, self-censorship, and anticipated rejection.
The scale was tested as part of a controlled group mentorship intervention with early-stage women entrepreneurs in the UK, in which participants in the mentorship group showed significant reductions in visibility risk scores alongside measurable increases in entrepreneurial self-efficacy — the belief in one’s ability to take the actions required to build a successful business.