Up for the job
The Gender Gap in Self-Promotion
Christine Exley & Judd Kessler
Harvard Working Paper, September 2019
Abstract:
In job applications, job interviews, performance reviews, and a wide range of other environments, individuals are explicitly asked or implicitly invited to describe their performance. In a series of experiments, we find that women subjectively describe their performance less favorably than equally performing men. This gender gap in self-promotion is notably persistent. It stays just as strong when we eliminate gender differences in confidence and when we eliminate strategic incentives to engage in self-promotion. Because of the prevalence of self-promotion opportunities, this self-promotion gap could potentially contribute to the persistent gender gap in education and labor market outcomes.
#MeToo Meets the Mutual Fund Industry: Productivity Effects of Sexual Harassment
Gjergji Cici et al.
University of Kansas Working Paper, August 2019
Abstract:
Sexual harassment, a widespread problem in the workplace, arguably keeps female employees from optimally employing their human capital. We show that removing or diminishing this friction improves productivity. Specifically, using the male-dominated fund industry as our testing ground, we show that productivity of female mutual fund managers significantly increased after the Harvey Weinstein scandal and the onset of the #MeToo movement. Evidence from lawsuits and organizational changes at several fund companies also suggests that reducing the threat of sexual harassment improves productivity. Our results have important implications for the policy debate on workforce diversity and costs of sexual harassment.
Do Workers Discriminate against Female Bosses?
Martin Abel
Middlebury College Working Paper, September 2019
Abstract:
I hire 2,700 workers for a transcription job, randomly assigning the gender of their (fictitious) manager and provision of performance feedback. While praise from a manager has no effect, criticism negatively impacts workers' job satisfaction and perception of the task's importance. When female managers, rather than male, deliver this feedback, the negative effects double in magnitude. Having a critical female manager does not affect effort provision but it does lower workers' interest in working for the firm in the future. These findings hold for both female and male workers. I show that results are consistent with gendered expectations of feedback among workers. By contrast, I find no evidence for the role of either attention discrimination or implicit gender bias.
Discursive Inequity and the Internal Exclusion of Women Speakers
Edana Beauvais
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
In today’s democracies, disempowered group members are no longer formally barred from the political arena. However, there is a concern that the historical memory of political inequality and exclusion remains as internalized cognitive dispositions, shaping behavior even after laws are changed. Focusing on the legacy of women’s political exclusion from the public sphere, I consider whether internal exclusions undermine women’s ability to influence political discourse even under conditions of formal political equality. All else being equal, do women and men in Western democracies have the same discursive influence? Are women particularly sensitive to men’s discursive authority? I help answer these questions using an experimental research design. The results of my study offer evidence that people are more willing to revise their opinions after hearing a man’s counterargument than after hearing a woman’s identical counterargument. This pattern appears to be driven by the way women respond to a man’s counterclaim. I discuss how gendered discursive inequities reinforce existing patriarchal structures, and the role that women inadvertently play in their own subjugation. I conclude by offering suggestions for better approximating the ideal of discursive gender equality.
Who Wants to Lead? Anticipated Gender Discrimination Reduces Women’s Leadership Ambitions
Susan Fisk & Jon Overton
Social Psychology Quarterly, September 2019, Pages 319-332
Abstract:
We examine whether anticipated gender discrimination — specifically, gendered sanctions for leadership failure — decreases women’s leadership ambitions. We find that laypeople expect that women leaders will be punished more harshly for failure than otherwise similar men. We also compare the leadership ambitions of women and men under conditions of benign and costly failure and find that leadership roles with costly failure — which implicitly have the potential for gendered sanctions for failure — disproportionally depress women’s leadership ambitions relative to men’s. Anticipated sanctions for failure mediate this effect, providing evidence that anticipated gender discrimination reduces women’s leadership ambitions. These results illuminate microlevel foundations of the stalled revolution by demonstrating how gendered beliefs about leadership are recreated, legitimized, and contribute to the dearth of women leaders. These findings also suggest that organizational responses to failure may produce gender differences in leadership ambitions and risk-taking behavior.
Overlapping Marathons: What Happens to Female Pace When Men Catch Up?
Erica Birk, Logan Lee & Glen Waddell
Southern Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
We exploit a highly competitive environment in which elite‐female athletes are exposed to the presence of men, but without being in direct competition with them. Specifically, we use variation in how fast the fastest man runs in the New York City Marathon to identify the potential influence of men on female performance while holding constant female‐runners' marginal incentives to perform. Our results suggest that as the men overtake the female runners, the performance of female runners declines differentially across ability, with the largest declines concentrated among lower ability runners.
Do US TRAP Laws Trap Women Into Bad Jobs?
Kate Bahn et al.
Feminist Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study explores the impact of women’s access to reproductive healthcare on labor market opportunities in the US. Previous research finds that access to the contraception pill delayed age at first birth and increased access to a university degree, labor force participation, and wages for women. This study examines how access to contraceptives and abortions impacts job mobility. If women cannot control family planning or doing so is heavily dependent on staying in one job, it is more difficult to plan for and take risks in their careers. Using data from the Current Population Survey’s Outgoing Rotation Group, this study finds that Targeted Restrictions on Abortion Providers (TRAP) laws increased “job lock.” Women in states with TRAP laws are less likely to move between occupations and into higher-paying occupations. Moreover, public funding for medically necessary abortions increases full-time occupational mobility, and contraceptive insurance coverage increases transitions into paid employment.
Modeling gender counter-stereotypic group behavior: A brief video intervention reduces participation gender gaps on STEM teams
Neil Lewis, Denise Sekaquaptewa & Lorelle Meadows
Social Psychology of Education, July 2019, Pages 557–577
Abstract:
In STEM project group teams, men speak for more time (Meadows and Sekaquaptewa, in: Proceedings of ASEE annual conference, 2011) and engage in more active technical participation than women, which can have negative long-term consequences (Cheryan et al. in Psychol Bull 143:1–35, 2017; Lord et al. in IEEE Trans Educ 54(4):610–618, 2011). In the current study, we tested the effects of a brief counter-stereotypic video intervention on gender gaps in verbal participation on mixed-gender teams of STEM students (N = 143). Participants viewed either a control video of an engineering student team behaving in a gender stereotype-consistent way (men talked longer and presented more technical information than women) in a group presentation and group interview, or a gender counter-stereotypic intervention version (roles reversed) prior to engaging in their own STEM group project task in a laboratory setting. Analysis of video footage of the groups showed that men spoke longer than women in the control condition, but men and women spoke for equal time in the intervention condition. This result was corroborated by participants’ self-report of their verbal participation in their group.
Discretionary Remote Working Helps Mothers Without Harming Non-mothers: Evidence from a Field Experiment
Eliot Sherman
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Because mothers remain disproportionately responsible for childcare, the daily requirement for physical presence at work disadvantages them compared with otherwise equivalent men and childless women. Relaxing this requirement may therefore enhance the well-being and productivity of working mothers. I tested this idea with a randomized field experiment, using a within-subjects analysis from a repeated crossover design. The 187 participants in the experiment, which ran for four weeks and yielded 748 person-week observations, revealed a preference for about two remote working days per week. I observed no significant differences in the uptake of remote working days between men, women, parents, nonparents, fathers, and mothers. Mothers reported meaningfully reduced family–work conflict during remote working weeks, but fathers did not. Remote working generally increased job performance, but the effect was greatest for mothers. The coordination costs of remote working, with respect to coworker helping and job interdependence, did not appear prohibitive. Interviews with study participants corroborate and contextualize these findings.
You can do it! An experimental evaluation of an encouragement intervention for female students
Joel Wong et al.
Journal of Positive Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although encouragement is a prevalent means of social support in everyday life, the empirical study of encouragement interventions has been sparse. Therefore, in this study, the authors evaluated an encouragement letter writing intervention. Participants were 140 (70 pairs of) doctoral advisors and their female advisees in Ph.D. psychology programs. Participants were randomly assigned to an experimental condition (advisors wrote and emailed a letter of encouragement to their advisees concerning their research potential) or a control condition (advisors wrote but did not send their letter of encouragement). About one month later, advisees in the experimental condition reported a greater increase in the advisor-advisee rapport (ηp2 = .12), interest in conducting research (ηp2 = .06), and interest in being a professor at a research-intensive university (ηp2 = .06) than those in the control condition. The advisor-advisee rapport, but not advisees’ relation-inferred self-efficacy, mediated the positive effects of the encouragement letter.
The effects of exposure to positive gender stereotypes on women’s and men’s performance in counter-stereotypical tasks and pursuit of agentic and communal goals
Rotem Kahalon, Nurit Shnabel & Julia Becker
Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Two studies examined the effects of exposure to positive gender stereotypes on performance in counter-stereotypical domains and pursuit of agentic and communal goals. Exposure to stereotypes about women’s communality (Study 1, N = 108) led to impaired math performance among women, regardless of their math identification. Exposure to stereotypes about men’s agency (Study 2, N = 129) led to impaired performance in a test of socio-emotional ability among men high in domain identification. Moreover, among women with high math identification, exposure to the communality stereotype increased the pursuit of agentic goals. Among men, exposure to the agency stereotype tended to decrease the pursuit of communal goals. These results are consistent with accumulating evidence for the “dark side” of positive stereotypes, yet, for women, they also point to active attempts to counteract them.
Gender, Race, Age, and National Origin Predict Whether Faculty Assign Female-Authored Readings in Graduate Syllabi
Amy Erica Smith et al.
PS: Political Science & Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Numerous studies document female scholars’ underrepresentation in political science publications and citations, yet few examine graduate syllabi. In this study, we assess the impact of instructors’ individual characteristics (i.e., race, gender, and age) on which readings they assign. We use what is — to our knowledge — the largest dataset of graduate readings to date: the GRaduate Assignments DataSet (GRADS), with 75,601 readings from 840 syllabi in 94 US PhD programs. We report several findings. First, overall, instructors infrequently assign female-authored scholarship relative to the rates at which women publish. Second, instructors who are women, people of color, and those from more gender-equal countries assign significantly more female-authored readings than white male instructors and those from less gender-equal countries. Third, among women — but not men — older instructors assign more female-authored work. We suggest that women’s underrepresentation on syllabi may contribute to “the leaky pipeline,” which describes women’s attrition from academic careers.
Widespread male sex bias in mammal fossil and museum collections
Graham Gower et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 17 September 2019, Pages 19019-19024
Abstract:
A recent study of mammoth subfossil remains has demonstrated the potential of using relatively low-coverage high-throughput DNA sequencing to genetically sex specimens, revealing a strong male-biased sex ratio [P. Pečnerová et al., Curr. Biol. 27, 3505–3510.e3 (2017)]. Similar patterns were predicted for steppe bison, based on their analogous female herd-based structure. We genetically sexed subfossil remains of 186 Holarctic bison (Bison spp.), and also 91 brown bears (Ursus arctos), which are not female herd-based, and found that ∼75% of both groups were male, very close to the ratio observed in mammoths (72%). This large deviation from a 1:1 ratio was unexpected, but we found no evidence for sex differences with respect to DNA preservation, sample age, material type, or overall spatial distribution. We further examined ratios of male and female specimens from 4 large museum mammal collections and found a strong male bias, observable in almost all mammalian orders. We suggest that, in mammals at least, 1) wider male geographic ranges can lead to considerably increased chances of detection in fossil studies, and 2) sexual dimorphic behavior or appearance can facilitate a considerable sex bias in fossil and modern collections, on a previously unacknowledged scale. This finding has major implications for a wide range of studies of fossil and museum material.