Episodes
Thursday Oct 13, 2016
Thursday Oct 13, 2016
There is an assumption that placing women in organizations’ high-status groups will be instrumental in the further diversification of their group. However, research has demonstrated that women, who are often sole representatives of their gender in high-status groups (solos), do not support female candidates trying to gain membership. As a result, management may look to female incumbents who have voluntarily helped other women in the past, although these female solos may actually feel licensed to give up the opportunity to select female candidates. In this seminar, Michelle Duguid examines experimental studies demonstrating that value threat underlies female solos’ decisions in the selection of a female candidate. For example, in situations where women experience less value threat, such as when they are majority group members or when they feel valued by their group members, they are more likely to favor a female candidate.
Michelle Duguid, Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior, Olin Business School, Washington University in St. Louis
Thursday Oct 29, 2015
Thursday Oct 29, 2015
Can symbolic awards motivate individuals to contribute their ideas and knowledge to a common project? Jana Gallus presents results from a large-scale natural field experiment at Wikipedia, exploring whether a purely symbolic award scheme can be used to motivate new editors and thus mitigate Wikipedia's editor retention problem. In a new project, she seeks to understand how awards have to be designed in order to enhance their recipients' self-confidence in gender-incongruent fields and encourage high-ability individuals to contribute their ideas. Speaker: Jana Gallus, Postdoctoral Fellow, Behavioral Insights Group, Harvard Kennedy School
Thursday Sep 10, 2015
What Works: Gender Equality, By Design
Thursday Sep 10, 2015
Thursday Sep 10, 2015
With gender equality increasingly a business imperative, in addition to being a human right, many leaders across the sectors wonder how we can get there. In the first WAPPP Seminar of 2015-16, Professor Bohnet discusses her forthcoming book "What Works: Gender Equality, By Design" (Harvard University Press 2016). Reviewing the impact of what we have been doing to date, including diversity and leadership trainings, networking, and mentorship/sponsorship programs, Bohnet proposes a new approach to leveling the playing field. Building on insights from Behavioral Economics, she argues that to overcome gender bias in organizations and society, we should focus on de-biasing systems—how we evaluate performance, hire, promote, structure tests, form groups—rather than on trying to de-bias people. Speaker: Iris Bohnet, Professor of Public Policy; Director, Women and Public Policy Program, Harvard Kennedy School
Thursday Mar 26, 2015
Competing At All Costs: Dysfunctional Competition and Gender with Pinar Fletcher
Thursday Mar 26, 2015
Thursday Mar 26, 2015
Costly sabotage occurs when individuals risk incurring losses in order to hurt their competitors. When are individuals more likely to engage in such dysfunctionally competitive behavior? Are there any gender differences in propensity to engage in costly sabotage? Pinar Fletcher studies these questions in three laboratory experiments.
Friday Oct 17, 2014
Risk in the background: How Men and Women Respond with Alexandra van Geen
Friday Oct 17, 2014
Friday Oct 17, 2014
Men and women respond differently to risk. Women are more risk averse
than men, which has a significant impact on how they make decisions.
Exploring this topic, Alexandra van Geen runs a series of experiments to
evaluate under what conditions women and men are more or less willing
to take risks. Specifically, she examines whether women and men are more
likely to take risks when the financial reward is higher; if they are
sensitive to the presence of other risks in the decision environment; or
whether winning in the past makes them more likely to take risk in the
future. She finds stark gender differences, including that men greatly
increase risk taking after winning a lottery, while women do not.
Investigating how, when and why men and women respond differently in
risky environments can help close the gender gap in risk taking.
Thursday Aug 21, 2014
Do boys and girls respond differently to academic competition? with Robert Jensen
Thursday Aug 21, 2014
Thursday Aug 21, 2014
This paper examines whether social stigma or peer sanctions associated with academic achievement or effort adversely affects girls’ school performance (in absolute terms, or relative to boys). The effects of the introduction of a point system and “leaderboard” into computer-based math and English courses in high schools in California revealed previously hidden information, namely who the top performers were in the class. This study finds that the system led to a very large decline in performance for students who were at the top of the class prior to introduction (those most “at risk” of being in the leaderboard), and a smaller increase in performance for students at the bottom of the class. Despite results from previous studies on stigma and performance, this study finds no differences in these effects between boys and girls in either English or math. The net effect of the point system and leaderboard worsen overall performance. Speaker: Robert Jensen, Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy, University of Pennsylvania
Thursday Aug 21, 2014
Thursday Aug 21, 2014
From faculty meetings and student projects to corporate boards and consulting firms, many decisions are made by groups rather than by individuals. In these settings, individuals may bring differing levels of knowledge and expertise to the table; therefore, the performance of the group depends heavily upon eliciting and acting upon the best information from the most informed individuals. Understanding how individuals make the decision of when toe volunteer information to the group is an important first step toward evaluating the efficiency of different group decision-making procedures. Speaker: Katie Coffman, Assistant Professor of Economics, Ohio State University
Thursday Aug 21, 2014
Gender, Competitiveness and Career Choices with Muriel Niederle
Thursday Aug 21, 2014
Thursday Aug 21, 2014
Gender differences in education choices are persistent, with females being much less likely to choose STEM fields than males. What, if any, is the role of gender differences in psychological attributes that have received a lot of attention in the behavioral/experimental literature, such a attitudes toward competition, in accounting for this gap? In this paper we show that competitiveness is predictive of education choices of students. Furthermore, gender differences in competitiveness account for roughly 20 percent of the gender gap in education choices. Speaker: Muriel Niederle, Professor of Economics, Stanford University