diff --git a/doc/source/whatsnew/v1.3.0.rst b/doc/source/whatsnew/v1.3.0.rst
index 990c87eab5a8d..44d97fffe1731 100644
--- a/doc/source/whatsnew/v1.3.0.rst
+++ b/doc/source/whatsnew/v1.3.0.rst
@@ -240,6 +240,7 @@ I/O
 - Bug in :func:`read_csv` raising ``IndexError`` with multiple header columns and ``index_col`` specified when file has no data rows (:issue:`38292`)
 - Bug in :func:`read_csv` not accepting ``usecols`` with different length than ``names`` for ``engine="python"`` (:issue:`16469`)
 - Bug in :func:`read_csv` raising ``TypeError`` when ``names`` and ``parse_dates`` is specified for ``engine="c"`` (:issue:`33699`)
+- Bug in :func:`read_clipboard`, :func:`DataFrame.to_clipboard` not working in WSL (:issue:`38527`)
 - Allow custom error values for parse_dates argument of :func:`read_sql`, :func:`read_sql_query` and :func:`read_sql_table` (:issue:`35185`)
 -
 
diff --git a/pandas/io/clipboard/__init__.py b/pandas/io/clipboard/__init__.py
index a8020f4bb4e4f..2d253d93295dd 100644
--- a/pandas/io/clipboard/__init__.py
+++ b/pandas/io/clipboard/__init__.py
@@ -45,6 +45,7 @@
 import contextlib
 import ctypes
 from ctypes import c_size_t, c_wchar, c_wchar_p, get_errno, sizeof
+import distutils.spawn
 import os
 import platform
 import subprocess
@@ -521,9 +522,8 @@ def determine_clipboard():
         return init_windows_clipboard()
 
     if platform.system() == "Linux":
-        with open("/proc/version") as f:
-            if "Microsoft" in f.read():
-                return init_wsl_clipboard()
+        if distutils.spawn.find_executable("wslconfig.exe"):
+            return init_wsl_clipboard()
 
     # Setup for the MAC OS X platform:
     if os.name == "mac" or platform.system() == "Darwin":