It's Her Job
Running Backwards and in High Heels: The Gendered Quality Gap and Incumbent Electoral Success
Sarah Fulton
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
The question of whether voter bias exists toward female politicians remains unsettled. Although anecdotal accounts of gender inequality abound, systematic research demonstrates that women "do as well as men" when they run. Previous work suggests that these conflicting observations result from an omitted variables problem. Specifically, if women are higher quality than men, and if quality is omitted from models of vote-share, then voter bias may be concealed. Using a unique measure of incumbents' political quality, the author's research documents a sex-based quality gap and importantly, is the first to link the quality gap to the gender parity in electoral success.
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Nathan Heflick & Jamie Goldenberg
Sex Roles, August 2011, Pages 149-155
Abstract:
In 2008, Republican John McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin, lost the U.S. presidential election to Barack Obama and his vice presidential candidate, Joe Biden. During the campaign, Palin's physical appearance, including her reported $150,000 makeover, received extensive media coverage. But, could the focus on her appearance have impacted the outcome of the election? Several lines of laboratory research suggest that this focus may have been detrimental to the Republican ticket because 1) it likely undermined perceptions of Palin's competence, warmth and morality, and 2) it may have increased Palin's focus on her own appearance, which, consistent with research on self-objectification, likely impaired the competency of her actual performance. Voting research supports the importance of candidates' perceived competence and character. Thus, while acknowledging the diverse influences on an election's outcome, a strong empirical case can be made that people objected to Sarah Palin (and therefore, John McCain), in part, because she was objectified. In contrast, there is no evidence to suggest that men suffer these same consequences when others, or they themselves, focus on their appearance. Therefore, it is not likely that the Democratic Obama-Biden ticket was hurt by these same factors.
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Cheryl Taylor et al.
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, July 2011, Pages 447-459
Abstract:
If successful role models undo stereotype threat effects by providing reassurance that group members can "take care of themselves," then the same real-world role model might inspire those who think she deserved success, but fail to inspire those who think she did not. In a pilot study, some women participants listed Hillary Clinton high among women who deserved their success; others listed her high among women who did not deserve their success. The former participants, but not the latter, claimed her success came from internal and stable causes and would inspire them in difficult situations. In the main study, women rated how much Hillary Clinton deserved her success. One month later, they were placed under mathematics stereotype threat, read a factual biography of Hillary Clinton, and took a GRE-Q test. Those who had earlier claimed Clinton deserved her success scored as well as a test-only control group; those who had earlier claimed she did not deserve her success scored as poorly as a threat-only control group. The results are seen as contributing to theories of role models, stereotype threat, and attribution.
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When Gender and Party Collide: Stereotyping in Candidate Trait Attribution
Danny Hayes
Politics & Gender, June 2011, Pages 133-165
Abstract:
Research has shown that voters are willing to stereotype candidates on the basis of their gender, which can sometimes pose obstacles and sometimes prove advantageous for female politicians. But the literature is uncertain about how candidate gender interacts with candidate party affiliation to shape voters' perceptions. In this article, I draw on political psychology, the women and politics literature, and recent work on partisan "trait ownership" to suggest that the application of gender stereotypes will be limited by the salience of partisan stereotypes. I use nationally representative survey data and a content analysis of news coverage from the 2006 U.S. Senate elections to test the argument. Focusing on voter evaluations of candidate traits, I find that party stereotypes are more powerful than gender stereotypes, and that assessments of candidate attributes can be affected by news coverage when candidates are portrayed in ways that challenge traditional partisan images. The results suggest that gender stereotyping is limited by the relevance of party stereotypes, and that as the Republican and Democratic parties continue to polarize at the elite level, the importance of partisan stereotyping is likely to increase.
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Victoria Brescoll, Eric Luis Uhlmann & Corinne Moss-Racusin
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Occupying gender stereotype-incongruent roles can lead individuals to lose status and earn a lower salary. The present research examined whether merely working for a supervisor in a gender-atypical occupational role leads a subordinate to lose status. Two studies found that male subordinates of gender deviants (i.e., a female supervisor in a masculine domain or a male supervisor in a feminine domain) were accorded lower status and were paid less than male subordinates of supervisors in gender-congruent roles (i.e., a female supervisor in a feminine domain or a male supervisor in a masculine domain). However, the status of female subordinates was unaffected by working for a gender atypical supervisor. Moreover, the status loss for male subordinates was mediated by a perceived lack of masculinity. Thus, establishing the male subordinate's masculine credentials eliminated the bias.
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The Impact of Gender Composition on Team Performance and Decision Making: Evidence from the Field
Jose Apesteguia, Ghazala Azmat & Nagore Iriberri
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigate whether the gender composition of teams affects their economic performance. We study a large business game, played in groups of three, in which each group takes the role of a general manager. There are two parallel competitions, one involving undergraduates and the other involving MBA students. Our analysis shows that teams formed by three women are significantly outperformed by all other gender combinations, both at the undergraduate and MBA levels. Looking across the performance distribution, we find that for undergraduates, three-women teams are outperformed throughout, but by as much as 0.47 of a standard deviation of the mean at the bottom and by only 0.09 at the top. For MBA students, at the top, the best performing group is two men and one woman. The differences in performance are explained by differences in decision making. We observe that three-women teams are less aggressive in their pricing strategies, invest less in research and development, and invest more in social sustainability initiatives than does any other gender combination.
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Nature or Nurture? Learning and the Geography of Female Labor Force Participation
Alessandra Fogli & Laura Veldkamp
Econometrica, July 2011, Pages 1103-1138
Abstract:
One of the most dramatic economic transformations of the past century has been the entry of women into the labor force. While many theories explain why this change took place, we investigate the process of transition itself. We argue that local information transmission generates changes in participation that are geographically heterogeneous, locally correlated, and smooth in the aggregate, just like those observed in our data. In our model, women learn about the effects of maternal employment on children by observing nearby employed women. When few women participate in the labor force, data are scarce and participation rises slowly. As information accumulates in some regions, the effects of maternal employment become less uncertain and more women in that region participate. Learning accelerates, labor force participation rises faster, and regional participation rates diverge. Eventually, information diffuses throughout the economy, beliefs converge to the truth, participation flattens out, and regions become more similar again. To investigate the empirical relevance of our theory, we use a new county-level data set to compare our calibrated model to the time series and geographic patterns of participation.
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The Emergence of Male Leadership in Competitive Environments
Ernesto Reuben et al.
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
We present evidence from an experiment in which groups select a leader to compete against the leaders of other groups in a real-effort task that they have all performed in the past. We find that women are selected much less often as leaders than is suggested by their individual past performance. We study three potential explanations for the underrepresentation of women, namely, gender differences in overconfidence concerning past performance, in the willingness to exaggerate past performance to the group, and in the reaction to monetary incentives. We find that men's overconfidence is the driving force behind the observed prevalence of male representation.
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Female tokens in high-prestige work groups: Catalysts or inhibitors of group diversification?
Michelle Duguid
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, forthcoming
Abstract:
There is a popular theory-based assumption that women, who are numerical minorities in high-prestige work groups, will advocate for other women as potential work group peers. However, these individuals may face special challenges in fulfilling this role. I examine how the prestige accorded to the work group and their numerical representation interact to impact women's concerns about being considered valued members of their groups and hence, their propensity to support other women in the selection process. I conducted three studies which showed that women will abdicate the opportunity to support highly or moderately qualified female candidates as potential work group peers. Furthermore, the concern that a highly qualified female candidate will be seen as more of a valued group member (competitive threat) and that a moderately qualified female candidate will adversely affect their value by reinforcing negative stereotypes about their demographic category (collective threat) partially mediated the relationship between numerical representation and work group prestige and women's preference for other women as work group peers.
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Defusing the Objectification of Women by Other Women: The Role of Competence
Valerie Johnson & Regan Gurung
Sex Roles, August 2011, Pages 177-188
Abstract:
This study provides empirical evidence that the objectification of women by other women can be attenuated by drawing attention to their competence. Primarily European American female undergraduate participants (N = 154) from the Midwestern part of the United States rated photographs of college-aged female models dressed provocatively a) standing against a plain background (control condition), b) showing athletic competence (standing near a swimming pool holding a trophy), and c) showing academic competence (solving a math problem on a whiteboard). Results showed that compared to the control condition, the models showing competence were rated lower on objectification variables and higher on capability variables regardless of their provocative manner of dress.
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Female Entrepreneurship, Agglomeration, and a New Spatial Mismatch
Stuart Rosenthal & William Strange
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Female entrepreneurs may be less networked than their male counterparts, and so derive less benefit from agglomeration. They may also have greater domestic burdens, and therefore have higher commuting costs. This paper develops a theoretical model showing that either of these forces can lead to the segregation of male- and female-owned businesses, with female entrepreneurs choosing locations farther from agglomerations and commuting shorter distances. Empirical analysis is consistent with these predictions. Female-owned businesses are segregated, often to a degree similar to black-white residential segregation. Female-owned enterprises are less exposed to agglomeration, with 10 to 20 percent less own-industry employment nearby.
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Yekaterina Chzhen & Karen Mumford
Labour Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper investigates gender differences across the log wage distributions of British employees working full-time in 2005. The raw gender wage gap shows a tendency to increase across the distribution with a glass ceiling effect indicated. A strong relationship between high skilled, white-collar occupations and carrying out managerial duties with the glass ceiling effect is indicated in the data. After allowing for positive selection into full-time employment by British women, a substantially larger gender earning gaps is found: the selection corrected gender wage gap is close to twice the raw gap across most of the earnings distribution. This selection corrected gap is found to be predominantly related to women receiving lower rewards for their characteristics than men. Indeed, the results suggest the gender earnings gap would all but disappear across the earnings distribution if women working full-time received the same returns to their characteristics as men working full-time in Britain do.
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Gender Differences in a Market with Relative Performance Feedback: Professional Tennis Players
David Wozniak
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent studies have found that females are less competitive than men. These studies have all relied on a similar framework where individuals have little information about their relative abilities compared to other potential competitors. It has also been found that performance feedback leads to more efficient choices for students and in experimental settings. Professional athletes competing in individual sports typically have access to performance feedback and good information about the quality of their potential competitors when choosing to enter competitive tournaments. In this paper, I use data from the International Tennis Federation (ITF) on tournament entry decisions by professional players to study gender differences in tournament entry and preferences in this competitive labor market. I find that even among this highly competitive population, gender differences exist in performance and tournament entry. In terms of performance I find that men exhibit a "hot hand" effect that can last for multiple periods while females are affected by only their performance in their last tournament. This effect is obvious in tournament entry where both men and women are more likely to enter tournaments after doing well, but women are affected by their last tournament while men's previous performance can affect entry beyond the next tournament. The gender difference from feedback is more striking when taking into account whether individuals actually played in a tournament. In that case, higher ability females respond positively to performance from their last tournament while males do not. But both genders see similar effects from previous performance in the short-term and the effects are larger for worse ranked individuals. Thus, in very competitive settings of same-sex tournaments, females and males respond differently to performance feedback information suggesting that information has very different, gender-specific effects for competitions and maybe largely dependent on the length of time that has elapsed from the competition that the feedback is coming from.
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The Power of Political Voice: Women's Political Representation and Crime in India
Lakshmi Iyer et al.
Harvard Working Paper, March 2011
Abstract:
Using state-level variation in the timing of political reforms, we find that an increase in female representation in local government induces a large and significant rise in documented crimes against women in India. Our evidence suggests that this increase is good news, as it is driven primarily by greater reporting rather than greater incidence of such crimes. In contrast, we find no increase in crimes against men or gender-neutral crimes. We also examine the effectiveness of alternative forms of political representation: Large scale membership of women in local councils affects crime against them more than their presence in higher-level leadership positions.
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Does Family Planning Help The Employment of Women? The Case of India
Francesca Francavilla & Gianna Claudia Giannelli
Journal of Asian Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper gives some insight into the existence of a positive effect of family planning programmes on women's employment in developing countries. We study married women aged 15 to 49 living throughout India using a sample drawn from the National Health Family Survey (NFHS-2) for 1998-1999. We focus on a programme of doorstep services delivered by health or family planning (FP) workers who are sent to visit women in their assigned areas. Results derived from the estimation of fixed effect linear probability and conditional logit models show a positive and significant correlation of the share of women living in a local area (village, town or city) that has been visited by FP workers with the probability of women's employment. A multinomial analysis also shows that the largest positive effect of FP in rural India is to be found on paid work, as opposed to unpaid work, suggesting a potential empowering feedback of demographic measures through labour earnings.
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The Opt-In Revolution? Contraception, Fertility Timing and the Gender Gap in Wages
Martha Bailey, Brad Hershbein & Amalia Miller
University of Michigan Working Paper, October 2010
Abstract:
Decades of research on the U.S. gender gap in wages describe its correlates, but little is known about why women changed their career investments in the 1960s and 1970s. We explore the role of changes in women's ability to time childbearing induced by the introduction of "the Pill." We find that birth cohorts in states with access to the Pill by age 21 invested more in market skills and earned an 8 percent hourly wage premium by age fifty. These improvements in skill upgrading accounted for roughly 10 percent of the narrowing of the gender gap over the 1980s.