Despite great progress over the last half century, there continue to be large gender differences in labor market outcomes. On average, women earn approximately 78 cents for every dollar earned by men (Goldin 2015). Professional leaders continue to be overwhelmingly male: among S&P 500 firms, 4.2% of CEOs are female, and women make up only 19.2% of corporate board members (Catalyst 2015a). And, in academia, there continues to be evidence for a leaky pipeline. Half of all tenure-track positions but only 37.5% of tenured positions in the United States in 2013 were held by women (Catalyst 2015b). Within economics, women make up 30% of assistant professors, 23.5% of associate professors, and just 12.1% of full professors (CSWEP 2014). Other STEM disciplines show similar patterns. Developing effective policy interventions demands that we understand more about what drives these patterns. Recent research in experimental economics has indicated that gender differences in preferences, in particular in risk preferences and willingness to compete, have important predictive power for labor market outcomes including occupational choice and earnings. The current project studies gender differences in preferences and their interaction with important labor market institutions.
This project consists of two laboratory experiments. In the first study, the PI explores an under-studied but important labor market decision: willingness to put oneself forward for promotion. She designs a careful laboratory experiment aimed at understanding which features of the labor market environment impact men's and women's willingness to apply for more challenging but higher return work. In the second study, she digs more deeply into the relationship between gender stereotypes and self-confidence, attempting to understand how stereotypical beliefs impact an individual?s confidence in her own ability and how this confidence predicts payoff-relevant decisions. These studies will contribute to a growing literature documenting the importance of gender differences in preferences in predicting labor market outcomes and earnings. These studies both follow the approach of using the controlled environment of the laboratory to isolate a gender difference in the domain of interest and to distinguish between competing explanations for the patterns we observe. Both projects consist of novel experimental frameworks that may be valuable to other researchers; in particular, the adaptable framework she proposes for understanding the decision to apply for promotion lends itself to studying a broader set of workplace-related questions in the future.
