Promotional Demographics
Remote Work and Job Applicant Diversity: Evidence from Technology Startups
David Hsu & Prasanna Tambe
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
A significant element of managerial post-COVID job design regards remote work. In an era of renewed recognition of diversity, employers may wonder how diverse (gender and race) and experienced job applicants respond to remote job listings, especially for high-skilled technical and managerial positions. Prior work has shown that while remote work allows employee flexibility, it may limit career promotion prospects, so the net effect of designating a job as remote-eligible is not clear from an applicant interest standpoint, particularly when recruiting females and underrepresented minorities (URM). We analyze job applicant data from a leading startup job platform that spans long windows before and after the COVID-19 pandemic-induced shutdowns of March 2020. To address the empirical challenge that remote job designation may be codetermined with unobserved job and employer characteristics, we leverage a matching approach (and an alternative method which leverages the sudden shutdowns) to estimate how applicant characteristics differ for otherwise similar remote and onsite job postings. We find that offering remote work attracts more experienced and diverse (especially URM) job applicants, with larger effects in less diverse geographic areas. A discrete change in job posting to remote status (holding all else constant) is associated with an approximately 15% increase in applicants who are female, 33% increase in applicants with URM status, and 17% increase in applicant experience. Using the application data, we estimate an average estimated compensating wage differential for remote work that is about 7% of posted salaries in this labor market.
Social Media and Job Market Success: A Field Experiment on Twitter
Jingyi Qiu et al.
University of Michigan Working Paper, May 2024
Abstract:
We conducted a field experiment on Twitter to examine the impact of social media promotion on job market outcomes in economics. Half of the 519 job market papers tweeted from our research account were randomly assigned to be quote-tweeted by prominent economists. Papers assigned to be quote-tweeted received 442% more views and 303% more likes. Moreover, candidates in the treatment group received one additional flyout, with women receiving 0.9 more job offers. These findings suggest that social media promotion can improve the visibility and success of job market candidates, especially for underrepresented groups in economics such as women.
Attrition and the Gender Patenting Gap
Abhay Aneja, Oren Reshef & Gauri Subramani
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Women are underrepresented in patenting. In this study, we consider differential responsiveness to rejection as a contributor to the gender gap in invention. Leveraging the prosecution histories of almost one million U.S. patent applications and the quasi-random assignment of applications to examiners, we show that women are 3.6-6.9 percentage points less likely to continue in the application process following an early-stage rejection. Conditional on applying for a patent, male-female disparities in the propensity to abandon applications account for more than half of the overall gender gap in issued patents. We provide suggestive evidence that institutional support can help reduce the attrition gap.
Dangerous Motivations: Understanding How Marginalization Relates to Benevolent Sexism Through Threat Perceptions
Tangier Davis et al.
Sex Roles, May 2024, Pages 600–612
Abstract:
In the present study, we draw from ambivalent sexism and frameworks centering marginalization to investigate how individuals’ marginalized race or gender identity influences their perceptions of benevolent sexism. We conducted an experimental scenario study during which a sample of Black and White adult participants (n = 325; Mage = 25.89 years) read a vignette about an interaction where a man student (perpetrator) gives a protective justification for restricting a woman student’s (target) involvement in one of two tasks for a class project. Participants were then asked about how dangerous they believed the tasks were, how they believed the woman target felt after her behavior was restricted, and whether they believed the man perpetrator had benevolent or malevolent motivations behind his restrictive behavior. We theorized that participants with marginalized race-gender identities would be more sensitive to threat, and consequently, that they would be more accepting of paternalistic behaviors. Our results supported the hypotheses: we found that compared to White men, participants with marginalized race and/or gender identities perceived the restricted task described in the vignettes as more dangerous and were consequently more likely to perceive the woman target as feeling more positively about her treatment and to perceive the man perpetrator as having more benevolent (and less malevolent) motivations for his behavior. These results suggest that individuals’ marginalized race or gender identities may influence their perceptions of benevolent sexism through their impact on how members from these groups perceive threat. The implications of study findings for future research and policy are discussed.
Email responsiveness varies based on the pronouns in the requesters’ email signature: The role of they/them pronouns
Megan McCarty
Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity, forthcoming
Abstract:
The current work is the first audit study to experimentally investigate bias toward people who use they/them pronouns in real-life circumstances, extending prior survey and experimental scenario work. Four hundred and sixty-six authors (62.30% perceived as female identifying and 37.70% perceived as male identifying as coded by independent raters) of recently published empirical psychology articles were contacted with a request for a copy of their recent work. The content of the emails was identical except the email signature was randomly assigned to include she/her, he/him, they/them, or no pronouns. The primary dependent variable was whether or not emails were responded to. As hypothesized, emails from requesters with they/them pronouns were less likely to be responded to overall than all other conditions. However, also consistent with hypotheses, this effect was moderated by the perceived gender of the author. Authors who were perceived as female responded at similar rates regardless of the pronouns in the requester’s email. Authors who were perceived as male were less likely to respond to emails from requesters with they/them pronouns than all other conditions. This work finds that people who use they/them pronouns experience bias in real-world situations due solely to their gender pronouns. This clear demonstration of gender bias even in a low-stakes educational setting highlights the need to further investigate and dismantle prejudice regarding gender diversity in academia.
Gender-Based Discrimination in Care Service Occupations: Result from an Online Experiment
Duc Hien Nguyen
University of Massachusetts Working Paper, April 2024
Abstract:
In this study, we conduct an online experiment to investigate discrimination based on masculine and feminine gender expression. In the experiment, participants were presented with fictional hiring scenarios and workers’ profiles and photos, which were manipulated to appear distinctively masculine or distinctively feminine. After viewing the workers, participants decided whether to interview them for the position of personal care attendant or group fitness instructor for the elderly. Our results show that gender expression can lead to economically meaningful disparities in labor market outcomes, but the effects are mediated by prevailing racial identities and stereotypes, as well as occupation-specific gender norms and expectations. After controlling for workers’ characteristics including human capital, Asian masculine workers and Black feminine workers still receive 10-20 percentage point higher interview rates than White feminine workers, equivalent to 20-50% increase. These are substantial differences, in the same order of magnitude as having one additional year of experience or having a community college degree. We also find suggestive evidence of heterogeneity due to participants’ gender, race, and sociopolitical values.
“It’s Not Like I Wanted Him Kicked Off the Football Team”: Alternative Approaches to Justice and Campus Sexual Assault
Kathleen Ratajczak & Anne Wingert
Crime & Delinquency, forthcoming
Abstract:
Current Title IX policy focuses strictly on adjudication and punishment for sexual assault on college campuses. Yet, the possibility of alternative forms of justice has long been a point of debate, with recent policy changes allowing for university choice in the application of transformative and restorative justice practices. The following study, using qualitative interviews with 23 student survivors from two universities, finds that student survivors of campus sexual assault were not focused on punishment as a remedy for their victimization. Instead, students discussed a desire to be heard, have their victimization recognized, and the creation of survivor-centered resources focused on healing and resiliency. Opportunities for alternative forms of justice that increase healing and help seeking among student survivors are discussed.
Gender, Competition, and Performance: International Evidence
Kai Li et al.
Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using a hand-collected sample of 18,269 equity analysts from 42 countries over the period 2004-2019, we establish an intriguing negative association between a country’s institutional/economic development and its female share of equity analysts. We show that, in individualistic countries only, there is no gender gap in analyst forecast accuracy. We further show that female analysts are more skilled and more likely to drop out when underperforming in individualistic countries compared to peers in collectivistic countries. The evidence supports our hypothesis that the national cultural value of individualism encourages women to make career choices consistent with their general aversion to competition.
One Cohort at a Time: A New Perspective on the Declining Gender Pay Gap
Jaime Arellano-Bover et al.
Northwestern University Working Paper, May 2024
Abstract:
This paper studies the interaction between the decrease in the gender pay gap and the stagnation in the careers of younger workers, analyzing data from the United States, Italy, Canada, and the United Kingdom. We propose a model of the labor market in which a larger supply of older workers can crowd out younger workers from top-paying positions. These negative career spillovers disproportionately affect the career trajectories of younger men because they are more likely than younger women to hold higher-paying jobs at baseline. The data strongly support this cohort-driven interpretation of the shrinking gender pay gap. The whole decline in the gap originates from (i) newer worker cohorts who enter the labor market with smaller-than-average gender pay gaps and (ii) older worker cohorts who exit with higher-than-average gender pay gaps. As predicted by the model, the gender pay convergence at labor-market entry stems from younger men's larger positional losses in the wage distribution. Younger men experience the largest positional losses within higher-paying firms, in which they become less represented over time at a faster rate than younger women. Finally, we document that labor-market exit is the sole contributor to the decline in the gender pay gap after the mid-1990s, which implies no full gender pay convergence for the foreseeable future. Consistent with our framework, we find evidence that most of the remaining gender pay gap at entry depends on predetermined educational choices.
The Effects of Information Provision on the Gender Gap in Technology: Experimental Evidence From Course Enrollment and Major Decisions
NaLette Brodnax
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article reports on the impacts of a nudge intervention designed to narrow the gender gap in technology education. I randomly assigned approximately 4,000 college freshmen to one of three advising interventions during new student orientation. Students in the treatment group received a brochure containing information about technology courses and were exposed to stereotypical imagery, neutral imagery, or counter-stereotypical imagery. Information provision had a positive impact on both technology course take-up and technology major selection. A stronger response by men led to an overall increase in the gender gap, but this gap is smallest among students exposed to counter-stereotypical imagery.