Episodes

Thursday Oct 26, 2017
Gender Differences in Self and Other-Competition with Johanna Mollerstrom
Thursday Oct 26, 2017
Thursday Oct 26, 2017
Using lab and online experiments with more than 2000 participants this work documents that women are less prone than men to compete against others, but equally willing to challenge themselves to improve and compete with their own past performance. The authors further explore the roles of risk attitudes and confidence and suggest that these factors can account for why there is a gender difference in the willingness to enter other-competitions, but not self-competitions. The effects are driven observability by single male peers.
Johanna Mollerstrom, Professor of Economics, Humboldt University, Department Head, "Competition and Consumers", DIW Berlin

Thursday Oct 08, 2015
Thursday Oct 08, 2015
Research on gender and risk taking indicates men have a greater tolerance for risk compared to women. This seminar explores the effects of gendered contextual cues on women’s risk preferences. Heidi Liu discuses experimental and archival data that finds women become more risk averse in masculine stereotypical realms in decision contexts. She shares analysis from an intervention tested to mitigate women’s risk aversion in masculine decision contexts: exposure to a counter-stereotypical role model (e.g., women succeeding in masculine-stereotypical performance domains). Speaker: Heidi Liu, Ph.D. Candidate in Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School; J.D. Candidate, Harvard Law 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.