Session 11: Gender

Commerce requires trust, but trust is difficult when one group can expropriate another due to differences in power. This can lead to the weaker group self-segregating into industries and activities; female-led businesses, for example, tend to be small and clustered in a small number of industries where collaborators are also female.  We present a model which relates this economic segregation to rule of law, and predicts that female trust depends on the protective preferences of adjudicators in weak rule of law environments. We then show that effective dispute negotiation in Lusaka, Zambia, especially as administered by ``market chiefs," enables trusting behavior by female entrepreneurs, both in cross-section correlations and in two artefactual field experiments. Such trust generates increased economic returns.  We find considerable heterogeneity across market chiefs in their preferences for protecting women, and that female entrepreneurs are more likely to want to reveal their gender with chiefs who are more likely to favor women.

This paper presents evidence that providing employment opportunities to women decreases domestic violence when the husband has economic self-interest in the wife’s work capacity. I use the government-induced rapid expansion of the coffee mills in Rwanda in the 2000s, which increased the value of coffee farmer couples’ output and provided wage employment for women. Since the mill operates only during the harvest months, the husband’s cost of physically incapacitating his wife changes within the year. This variation, in conjunction with novel monthly administrative records on domestic violence hospitalizations, provides a way to distinguish the incapacitation cost mechanism from the rise in women’s bargaining power and household income, which are identified by multiple rounds of household survey data.

This study investigates gender-based attribution bias—the tendency to attribute men’s success to ability and women’s failure to a lack of ability—using a controlled principal-agent online experiment. We test for this bias across male- and female-typed tasks using both between- and within-principal variation. In male-typed tasks, we find evidence of attribution bias after task success: principals are more likely to attribute success to ability when the agent is male. We do not observe such bias following failure. Our design allows us to rule out taste-based and statistical discrimination. In contrast, in female-typed tasks, we find bias against men following task failure more strongly, pointing to the importance of task domain in shaping attribution patterns. Attribution bias is stronger among individuals with more regressive gender attitudes but only for male-typed task, suggesting an attitudinal basis for attribution patterns.

Gender quotas are widely used to address gender disparities, but they may trigger backlash that undermines their effectiveness. In an online experiment simulating hiring decisions, we find clear evidence of such backlash. When participants acting as recruiters are required to hire an additional female candidate, they offer reduced salaries and lower hiring rates to other women–but only when female candidates underperform relative to males. Hence, quota backlash exists, but it is performance-specific. The presence of a quota appears to raise the bar for evaluating other women, inadvertently intensifying scrutiny of the targeted group.

Can women influence household decisions through effective communication when they lack decision rights? We conduct a field experiment in India to test whether a communication training for married women impacts female labor supply, an important decision households make and a frequent source of intra-household disagreement. The treatment shifted women’s communication styles towards the techniques taught in the training. We find positive effects on labor supply and earnings but, consistent with theory, only for women who were more interested than their husbands in the women working. These effects last at least one year post-treatment and represent a 53% increase in earnings over this period. Mechanisms analyses suggest the labor supply effects come from women changing their husbands’ preferences rather than shifts in bargaining power. A back-of-the-envelope calculation estimates this treatment to be highly cost-effective at raising female employment relative to public vocational training.

We study whether commuting barriers constrain women’s labor supply in urban Pakistan. We randomize offers of gender-segregated or mixed-gender commuting services at varying prices. Women-only transport more than doubles job application rates, while mixed-gender transport has minimal effects on men’s and women’s application rates. Women value the women-onlyservice morethanlarge price discounts for the mixed-gender service. Results are similar for baseline labor force participants and non-participants, suggesting there are many “latent jobseekers” close to the margin of participation. These findings highlight the importance of safety and propriety concerns in women’s labor decisions.

Women sort into low-paying firms for otherwise similar jobs. This may reflect a preference for the non-wage amenities these firms offer, or a lack of information about foregone wages. This paper proposes an explanation at the intersection of both. I document that large, high-paying firms are more likely to withhold salary information from job-seekers, and less likely to offer flexibility. Meanwhile, women are more bargaining-averse than men and place greater value on flexibility. When salaries are public, both men and women apply more to high-paying firms; but when salaries are concealed, only women refrain. This suggests that rather than women ``buying'' flexibility with pay, flexibility offsets uncertainty about pay. To causally test whether salary information can redirect search, I field an experiment on Pakistan's largest job search platform, randomizing mandated versus optional salary disclosure across ~20,000 jobs and 8,900 firms. Posted salaries of treated jobs rise by 3%, but the amenity landscape remains unchanged. Applications increase by 49%, driven by a surge of interest in large firms. Search reallocation from small to large firms is 42.6 percentage points stronger for women, reversing the gender gap in sorting. These findings underscore the power of information in reallocating search, even when amenities and preferences remain fixed.

This study examines the effects of gender pay gap transparency on workplace recommendations, beliefs about labor market experiences, wage negotiation, and job applications. I first present survey evidence showing that, across workplace contexts, jobs with a transparent gender pay gap are less likely to be recommended to women and are expected to offer them worse pay, promotion prospects, and workplace treatment. In addition, I design an experiment to test workers’ willingness to ask for higher pay when pay gap information is either provided or withheld. I find that there is no substantial gender gap when such information is absent, but a significant gap emerges when it is made transparent. Specifically, women are much less likely than men to request higher wages when they learn that prior interactions with their counterpart resulted in outcomes favoring men. This highlights an unintended consequence of pay gap transparency: rather than encouraging women to negotiate, it discourages them, widening the gender gap in asking for higher wages. However, this effect disappears when workers face conditions that remove concerns about rejection or gender discrimination. In another part of the experiment, I also examine behavioral responses at the job application margin and find that women are similarly less likely to apply for jobs when the associated pay gap is made transparent, leading to increased gender imbalance in both applications submitted and jobs accepted.

This paper examines how safe public transportation reshapes women’s economic opportunities in urban India by leveraging the Delhi Metro’s phased construction as a natural experiment. Despite India’s economic growth, urban female employment remains stubbornly low at 10%. Using the staggered roll-out of metro lines and novel spatially granular administrative data, we demonstrate that metro access significantly increases female employment through an unexpected channel: creation of local job opportunities availed by women who do not commute in the metro. Metro access spurs the creation of mid-sized firms in the retail sector, especially female-owned ones, contributing to the increased proportion of women employed in such firms. These effects are highly localized, concentrated within a one-mile radius of metro stations.

Our ongoing fieldwork collects detailed mobility data to disentangle three distinct mechanisms: expanded commuting radii for female workers, increased local job opportunities, and enhanced consumer mobility driving demand for female-friendly businesses. Preliminary evidence suggests that firms enter near metro stations due to increased access to consumers, and these firms primarily employ workers who live within 2km and commute to work by walk or auto rickshaws. This pattern indicates that metro systems create concentrated economic hubs that benefit nearby residents—especially women who remain too constrained to use the transportation infrastructure for longer commutes—challenging conventional assumptions about how transit infrastructure impacts labor market access.

The study makes three key contributions to the literature: First, it examines the general equilibrium effects of transportation infrastructure by considering both direct effects through improved commuting and indirect effects through changed economic geography. Second, it explores how transit access and public infrastructure affects labor demand through firm composition and consumer mobility changes. Third, it augments existing spatial equilibrium models with gender-specific mobility constraints by quantifying safety costs. It also makes a contribution to the data by putting together administrative datasets for urban India at a spatially granular level of wards and neighborhoods, which enables analysis at a much more disaggregated level than previously possible.

Despite rising education and stated willingness to work for pay outside the house-hold, female labor force participation in India remains low. This study presents evidence from two field experiments studying the role of spousal jealousy in constraining women’s employment. In a first experiment, I randomize married women to receive jobs in either a mixed or women-only workplace. Women are 45 percent less likely to apply for and 29 percent less likely to start a job in the workplace where men are present. The treatment effects are almost entirely driven by households with more jealous and controlling husbands. We also find strong spillovers that attenuate the treatment effects and change husbands’ attitudes towards their wife working in the mixed-office, particularly in jealous households. In a second experiment, I more directly test for spousal jealousy by measuring demand for monitoring. I offer women the option to forgo a fraction of their salary to avoid interacting remotely with a male colleague. Fifty-five percent choose to do so when the interactions are one-on-one, compared to 34 percent when their husband can observe the interactions. Additional treatment arms find similar treatment effects from social monitoring and rule out communication mechanisms.

I explore how gender biased feedback affects the productivity of workers in an online labor market. Using a design change on YouTube where the platform removed public displays of how often a video has been disliked, I show that — while dislike counts were public — female content creators received significantly more negative feedback on comparable content than male content creators. This gender gap in negative feedback is eliminated after the design change. Using detailed video- and channel- level data and a fuzzy difference-in-differences identification strategy, I show that the removal of excess negative feedback significantly and persistently increased the productivity of female content creators and consumer demand for their content. Relative to men, women produce 8.4 percent more videos after the platform design change. The increase in productivity coincides with an even larger increase of 15.5 percent in demand for content produced by women. Investigating mechanisms, I show that the reduction in negative feedback is primarily driven by changes in the upper tail of the distribution of dislikes and is consistent with the platform’s objective of reducing harassment through ‘dislike attacks’. Finally, I show that there are limited spillover effects on toxicity in other feedback channels and provide evidence from a placebo-test to confirm that productivity effects are indeed driven by the reduction in dislikes.

Masculinity norms are socially constructed expectations around men’s behaviors. These norms include expectations that men should suppress their emotions or use violence to get respect. I measure agreement with masculinity norms among adolescent boys and girls and document that adolescents systematically overestimate their peers’ agreement with these norms. Using two field experiments in 25 schools in Rio de Janeiro, I show that a lack of communication with peers sustains the existence of these misperceptions. I provide evidence that miscalibrated expectations about interest and comfort in these discussions are a driver of the lack of communication, creating a self-reinforcing cycle.

I study the effect of childbirth on women’s entrepreneurial activity. Drawing on Canadian administrative data and using an event study and instrumental variable design, I show that childbirth has substantial and persistent negative effects on women’s founding rates and firm performance. The effects extend to employees of mother-owned firms, who experience a decline in earnings. In contrast, firms owned by men show no decline in performance after childbirth. The results cannot be fully explained by household specialization based on labor market advantage. Childcare availability and progressive gender norms mitigate the adverse effect of childbirth on the entrepreneurship gap.

I show that financial markets react asymmetrically to bad news about firm performance depending on whether it is delivered by male or female CEOs. This asymmetry manifests itself in analysts’ forecasts, stock returns on earnings announcement days, and even in the tone that analysts adopt in earnings conference calls. I argue that these patterns have a common origin in a reduced skepticism towards male CEOs. To make this case, I first document that analysts’ beliefs about firm performance systematically under-react to bad news from male-led companies relative to the rational expectations benchmark, whereas they adjust their expectations rationally to similar bad news from female-led companies. Next, I show that investors also display this biased reaction to news, with stock returns reacting less negatively to negative surprises from male-led companies relative to their female-led peers on earnings announcement days. I then shed light on the underlying mechanism by constructing a text-based measure of disagreement from earnings conference calls. After negative surprises, analysts express less disagreement with the narrative conveyed by male- led firms relative to their female-led peers. This effect is entirely concentrated amongst male analysts, who represent, on average, more than 85% of the participants in these calls.

This paper examines the influence of managers from countries with different gender norms on workplace culture and gender disparities within organizations. Using data from a multinational firm operating in over 100 countries, we exploit crosscountry manager rotations that are orthogonal to local employees to estimate the impact of male managers’ gender norms on the work outcomes of male and female employees within the same team. Managers from countries with one standard deviation more progressive gender attitudes narrow the gender pay gap by 5 percentage points (18%), primarily by promoting women at higher rates. The effects last beyond the manager’s rotation and are concentrated in countries with more conservative gender attitudes. Moreover, local managers in the destination office change their own attitudes, as evidenced by those managers in turn being more gender-equal with their subordinates. Our evidence points to individual managers as critical in shaping corporate culture.

Pakistan ranks in the lowest decile in female labor force participation, and even in sectors where women are more prevalent, such as teaching, they earn 70 cents for each dollar men earn. While we have extensive evidence on the prevalence of gender bias in hiring, promotions and wages, we know less about the mechanisms underlying this bias and the extent to which certain personnel policies may mitigate or exacerbate these biases. To test this, I conduct a large scale field experiment with 3,600 employees in 250 schools and randomly vary i). how often managers observe a given employee and ii). whether manager evaluations affect employee’s pay or are just used for feedback. First, I find when there are no financial stakes associated with performance evaluations, there is minimal difference in scores between men and women. This holds even when controlling for a rich set of controls of teacher productivity, such as value-added, clock in and out time, time use, and pedagogy measured via classroom observations. In contrast, when principals’ evaluations determine teachers’ end of year raise, we see that female teachers receive 20% lower raises, controlling for productivity. However, when principals are randomly assigned to conduct more frequent classroom observations of the teacher, this increases the evaluation of female teachers and closes two-thirds of the gender gap under financial stakes. To understand mechanisms, I conduct a follow up vignette survey to test whether our results are due to differential manager expectations about employee reactions to low raises (e.g. higher turnover by men) or differential perceived deservedness of scarce financial resources. The results favor this second explanation as managers favoring single-earner (lower income) households over dual-earner (higher income) households, which is highly correlated with employee gender. Combined this suggests that improving the accuracy of manager information could close the gender gap in performance evaluations, even in high stakes settings.

In 2002, Sweden reformed its parental leave system by adding a second “daddy month,” i.e., a second month of pay-related parental leave reserved exclusively for each parent. In addition to giving fathers an economic incentive to take more leave, this change had an effect on cultural norms. We develop and estimate a model of the household in which preferences towards leave depend on the behavior of one’s peers and use it to quantify the magnitudes of the economic-incentive effects as well as the evolving norms. We find that endogenously evolving cultural norms play a major role. We use our model to evaluate the effects of several potential policy changes including decreasing the cost of child care and giving each parent a non-transferable endowment of parental leave and conclude that only the latter would have a significant effect on the share of parental leave taken by men.

What are the productivity effects of hiring underrepresented talent? We investigate this question in the context of World War II, when a shortage of male labor forced US firms to hire female scientists. Using new data on the scientific personnel of US firms, we exploit firm-level variation in exposure to enlistment as an instrument for female hires. Firms exposed to enlistment hired 1.4 times more female scientists during the war. Firms that hired at least 1 female scientist during the war produced 1 additional publication per 11 scientists on average after the war - but no additional patents. Data on the job titles of scientists document significant heterogeneity in the tasks that female scientists performed across firms. Firms that placed women in leadership roles experienced an increase in patenting, while firms that used women as librarians had an increase in publications, but not innovation.