Group policy
Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance and the Gender Wage Gap
Benjamin Cowan & Benjamin Schwab
Journal of Health Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
During prime working years, women have higher expected healthcare expenses than men. However, employees’ insurance rates are not gender-rated in the employer-sponsored health insurance (ESI) market. Thus, women may experience lower wages in equilibrium from employers who offer health insurance to their employees. We show that female employees suffer a larger wage gap relative to men when they hold ESI: our results suggest this accounts for roughly 10% of the overall gender wage gap. For a full-time worker, this pay gap due to ESI is on the order of the expected difference in healthcare expenses between women and men.
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Closing Achievement Gaps With a Utility-Value Intervention: Disentangling Race and Social Class
Judith Harackiewicz et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Many college students abandon their goal of completing a degree in science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM) when confronted with challenging introductory-level science courses. In the U.S., this trend is more pronounced for underrepresented minority (URM) and first-generation (FG) students, and contributes to persisting racial and social-class achievement gaps in higher education. Previous intervention studies have focused exclusively on race or social class, but have not examined how the 2 may be confounded and interact. This research therefore investigates the independent and interactive effects of race and social class as moderators of an intervention designed to promote performance, measured by grade in the course. In a double-blind randomized experiment conducted over 4 semesters of an introductory biology course (N = 1,040), we tested the effectiveness of a utility-value intervention in which students wrote about the personal relevance of course material. The utility-value intervention was successful in reducing the achievement gap for FG-URM students by 61%: the performance gap for FG-URM students, relative to continuing generation (CG)-Majority students, was large in the control condition, .84 grade points (d = .98), and the treatment effect for FG-URM students was .51 grade points (d = 0.55). The UV intervention helped students from all groups find utility value in the course content, and mediation analyses showed that the process of writing about utility value was particularly powerful for FG-URM students. Results highlight the importance of intersectionality in examining the independent and interactive effects of race and social class when evaluating interventions to close achievement gaps and the mechanisms through which they may operate.
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Educational Outcomes of Asian and Hispanic Americans: The Significance of Skin Color
Igor Ryabov
Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, forthcoming
Abstract:
Existing evidence suggests that skin tone is an important determinant of one's life chances. Although social science research has a strong tradition of elucidating the link between race and educational outcomes, the effect of skin color on educational attainment has not received adequate attention. The main objective of the present investigation was, using a nationally representative longitudinal data, to evaluate educational attainment of Asian American and Hispanic young adults in the United States as a function of skin tone and other co-variates. Separate analyses were carried out for Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans, other Hispanics, East Asian, Filipino American and other Asians. Additional analyses were conducted on a subsample of sibling pairs of Asian and Hispanic origin. Control variables included family socio-economic background, parental involvement, family social support, average school SES and others. Although we observed a certain degree of cross-ethnic heterogeneity, the results consistently point to a strong association between educational attainment and the lightness of skin tone. The findings also suggest that the aforementioned relationship is the strongest among U.S. young adults of Filipino and Puerto Rican descent.
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Knowing When to Ask: The Cost of Leaning In
Christine Exley, Muriel Niederle & Lise Vesterlund
Harvard Working Paper, September 2015
Abstract:
Gender differences in the propensity to initiate negotiations has been used to explain the persistent wage gap between men and women, and a recent literature suggests that women would benefit from "leaning-in" and negotiating more. We use a laboratory experiment to examine the effect of such a recommendation. After learning their contribution to a joint firm-worker profit, workers receive a random wage offer which is on average lower than the workers' contribution. Workers then decide whether to accept this wage offer, or whether to enter a negotiation with the firm. We find that women often avoid the negotiation, even though those who enter negotiations have significantly positive returns from doing so. Thus our data suggest that a recommendation to lean-in would improve the outcome for women. To assess the effect of a lean-in recommendation we investigate returns from negotiations when women are instead forced to negotiate. We find that the additional women who now enter negotiations have significant negative returns from asking. Indeed we find that when given a choice women optimally select into the negotiation: women knew when and whether to ask. Those who were not good at negotiating avoided negotiations that they would lose from. Thus we demonstrate that there are environments where the recommendation to lean-in is harmful.
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Glass Floors and Glass Ceilings: Sex Homophily and Heterophily in Job Interviews
Lauren Rivera, Jayanti Owens & Katherine Gan
Northwestern University Working Paper, 2015
Abstract:
A widely assumed but little tested theory of employment interviewing suggests that female job applicants will be evaluated more favorably when they are paired with female versus male interviewers. To capitalize on this hypothesized affinity, a number of organizations have begun explicitly pairing female job applicants with female interviewers, with the hopes of increasing the representation of women among new hires. However, whether this practice actually results in more favorable outcomes for female job candidates remains an open empirical question. Using micro-level data on real-life job interview evaluations from a large, professional services organization, we test the effect of matching female job candidates with female interviewers on hiring recommendations. Highlighting the contextually dependent nature of sex homophily, we find that the effect of being matched with a female interviewer for female candidates varies by the perceived skill level of the candidate. Sex matches in job interviews work in favor of those female candidates perceived to be lowest in skill, have a small, statistically non-significant negative effect for female candidates of average perceived skill, and have a significant, negative effect for women at the highest level of perceived skill. Consequently, we argue that matching female candidates with female evaluators in job interviews can operate both as a glass floor that can prevent female applicants from falling below a certain scoring threshold but also a glass ceiling that can prevent the most skilled female applicants from receiving the highest interview ratings and most positive hiring recommendations.
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Drew Jacoby-Senghor, Stacey Sinclair & Nicole Shelton
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We posit instructors' implicit racial bias as a factor in racial disparities in academic achievement and test the relationship between this factor, instructor lesson quality, and learners' subsequent test performance. In Study 1, white participants were assigned to the role of instructor and gave a short lesson to a learner who was either black or white. Instructors' implicit bias predicted diminished test performance on the part of black, but not white, learners. Further, instructors' anxiety and lesson quality, as rated by coders, mediated the relationship between their implicit bias and learners' test performance. In Study 2, a separate sample of non-black participants watched videos of instructors from cross-race lessons from the first experiment. Once again, instructors' implicit bias predicted diminished test performance by participants. These findings suggest that underperformance by minorities in academic domains may be driven by the effect implicit racial biases have on educators' pedagogical effectiveness.
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Loren Henderson et al.
Review of Black Political Economy, December 2015, Pages 459-479
Abstract:
This research seeks to understand the degree to which credit scores of new business startups are influenced by racial or gender discrimination. It examines the degree to which access to business credit lines is influenced by racial and gender-related factors that go beyond would-be borrowers’ credit scores. Using credit data from new startups, the analysis finds that, when controlling for firm and human capital characteristics, Black-owned startups receive lower than expected business credit scores. Whites are more favorably treated in credit score determination than are African Americans with the same firm characteristics and owner characteristics. Moreover, Whites are more favorably treated when it comes to access to credit lines than are African Americans, Latinos, and Asians with the same firm characteristics, owner characteristics, and credit scores. Men are more favorably treated when it comes to access to credit lines than are women. A Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition suggests that credit lines for Black-owned businesses would more than double, Latino-owned businesses’ lines of credit would nearly triple, Asian-owned businesses’ lines of credit would more than triple, and those where the primary owners are women would be more than twice as large if their business lines of credit were determined in the same way as those for businesses owned primarily by Whites and by men. The implications of these results are discussed.
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Gender Differences in Recognition for Group Work
Heather Sarsons
Harvard Working Paper, September 2015
Abstract:
Within academia, men are tenured at higher rates than women are in most quantitative fields, including economics. Researchers have attempted to identify the source of this disparity but find that nearly 30% of the gap remains unexplained even after controlling for family commitments and differences in productivity. Using data from academic economists' CVs, I test whether coauthored and solo-authored publications matter differently for tenure for men and women. While solo-authored papers send a clear signal about one's ability, coauthored papers are noisy in that they do not provide specific information about each contributor's skills. I find that men are tenured at roughly the same rate regardless of whether they coauthor or solo-author. Women, however, suffer a significant penalty when they coauthor. The results hold after controlling for the total number of papers published, quality of papers, field of study, tenure institution, tenure year, and the number of years it took an individual to go up for tenure. The result is most pronounced for women coauthoring with only men and is less pronounced the more women there are on a paper, suggesting that some gender bias is at play. I present a model in which bias enters when workers collaborate and test its predictions in the data.
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Members of high-status groups are threatened by pro-diversity organizational messages
Tessa Dover, Brenda Major & Cheryl Kaiser
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, January 2016, Pages 58–67
Abstract:
Members of high-status groups may perceive pro-diversity messages from organizations as threatening to their group's status. Two initial studies (N = 322) demonstrate that when imagining applying for a job, whites — and not ethnic/racial minorities — expressed more concerns about being treated unfairly and about anti-white discrimination when the company mentioned (vs. did not mention) its pro-diversity values. In a third experiment, white men (N = 77) participated in a hiring simulation. Participants applying to the pro-diversity company exhibited greater cardiovascular threat, expressed more concerns about being discriminated against, and made a poorer impression during the interview relative to white men applying to a neutral company. These effects were not moderated by individual differences in racial identification, racial attitudes, or system fairness beliefs. These findings suggest that high-status identities may be more sensitive to identity threats than commonly assumed, and that this sensitivity is robust to differences in higher-order beliefs and attitudes.
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Sex Differences in Furniture Assembly Performance: An Experimental Study
Susanne Wiking et al.
Applied Cognitive Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study examined sex differences in furniture assembly performance by manipulating the availability of instructions. Two groups of participants with an equal number of men and women assembled a kitchen trolley from IKEA. One group received step-by-step instructions, and the other group a diagram of the finished product. In addition, individual spatial ability was measured with the mental rotation test (MRT) and added to the analyses. Our results showed that men assembled the furniture faster (d = 0.78) and more accurately (d = 0.65) than women. Overall, participants performed better with step-by-step instructions than without (d = 0.61), and the time spent on instructions was negatively related to MRT scores, r = −.428, p = .006. Aside from the time spent on instructions, women assembled the furniture nearly as fast as men did, and the sex difference in assembly score could be explained by differences in individual spatial ability.
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Priming Effects and Performance Expectations in Mixed-Sex Task Groups
Joseph Dippong
Social Psychology Quarterly, December 2015, Pages 387-398
Abstract:
I report the results of a laboratory experiment in which I examine the relationship between cognitive categorization processes and status-organizing processes, focusing on how seemingly irrelevant information becomes relevant to the informational structure of a task situation. In phase one, participants completed a task in which they were primed with photographs of women occupying either stereotypical or counter-stereotypical roles. In phase two, participants, along with a partner, completed a collective decision-making task. The two experimental phases were ostensibly unrelated from the participants’ point of view. Results indicate that priming manipulations significantly affected patterns of influence in mixed-sex groups. These effects were driven primarily by altering expectations of female group members.
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Risk Aversion for Decisions under Uncertainty: Are there Gender Differences?
Rakesh Sarin & Alice Wieland
Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
It has become well accepted that women are more risk averse than men. For objective probability gambles, typically used in eliciting risk aversion, we find women generally have a lower valuation than men, thus exhibiting greater risk aversion. This paper investigates whether this finding extends to decisions under uncertainty – where probabilities are not given and individuals may assign different probabilities to the same event (e.g. outcomes of award shows or sporting events).We find that for decisions under uncertainty, men and women value the bets similarly, both before and after controlling for participant's subjective probabilities.
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Joseph Wellman, Xi Liu & Clara Wilkins
British Journal of Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The current research examines how status-legitimizing beliefs (SLBs) influence White people's perceptions of anti-White bias, endorsement of zero-sum beliefs, and support for Affirmative Action. We suggest that SLBs perpetuate inequality by increasing White people's perceptions of zero-sum beliefs and anti-White bias, which in turn lead to decreased support for Affirmative Action. White individuals primed with SLBs perceived greater anti-White bias, endorsed greater zero-sum beliefs, and indicated less support for Affirmative Action than individuals primed with neutral content. Mediation analysis revealed that the SLB prime decreased support for Affirmative Action by increasing perceptions of anti-White bias. This research offers experimental evidence that SLBs contribute to White people's perceptions of anti-White bias and to decreased support for Affirmative Action.
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Ajay Palvia, Emilia Vähämaa & Sami Vähämaa
Journal of Business Ethics, October 2015, Pages 577-594
Abstract:
This paper examines whether bank capital ratios and default risk are associated with the gender of the bank’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Chairperson of the board. Given the documented gender-based differences in conservatism and risk tolerance, we postulate that female CEOs and board Chairs should assess risks more conservatively, and thereby hold higher levels of equity capital and reduce the likelihood of bank failure during periods of market stress. Using a large panel of U.S. commercial banks, we document that banks with female CEOs hold more conservative levels of capital after controlling for the bank’s asset risk and other attributes. Furthermore, while neither CEO nor Chair gender is related to bank failure in general, we find strong evidence that smaller banks with female CEOs and board Chairs were less likely to fail during the financial crisis. Overall, our findings are consistent with the view that gender-based behavioral differences may affect corporate decisions.
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Christopher Cotton et al.
Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, December 2015, Pages 56–67
Abstract:
Recent studies show that males may increase their performance by more than females in response to competitive incentives. The literature suggests that this may contribute to observed gender gaps in labor force pay and achievement. Understanding which factors may drive these gender differences is essential for designing policies that promote equality. We adopt a game theoretic model of contests to consider a variety of explanations for the differences in male and female competitive performance that have been proposed in the empirical and experimental literature. Comparing the testable predictions of the model with the empirical evidence from past papers, we reject explanations involving male over-confidence, misperceptions about relative ability, and some types of preference differences. Explanations involving female under-confidence and differences in risk aversion are consistent with the significant evidence. Two explanations provide perfect matches to observed performance patterns: (i) males are better than females at handling competitive pressure, and (ii) males enjoy competition more or have greater desire to win than females.
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Gender Gaps in High School Students’ Homework Time
Seth Gershenson & Stephen Holt
Educational Researcher, November 2015, Pages 432-441
Abstract:
Gender differences in human capital investments made outside of the traditional school day suggest that males and females consume, respond to, and form habits relating to education differently. We document robust, statistically significant one-hour weekly gender gaps in secondary students’ non-school study time using time diary data from the 2003–2012 waves of the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) and transcript data from the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS). These complementary data sets provide consistent evidence of gender gaps that favor females and are not explained by gender differences in after-school time use, parental involvement, educational expectations, course taking, past academic achievement, or cognitive ability.
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Emily Coyle & Lynn Liben
Child Development, forthcoming
Abstract:
Gender schema theory (GST) posits that children approach opportunities perceived as gender appropriate, avoiding those deemed gender inappropriate, in turn affecting gender-differentiated career trajectories. To test the hypothesis that children's gender salience filters (GSF—tendency to attend to gender) moderate these processes, 62 preschool girls (M = 4.5 years) were given GSF measures. Two weeks later, they played a computer game about occupations that manipulated the game-character's femininity (hyperfeminized Barbie vs. less feminized Playmobil Jane). Following game play, girls’ interests in feminine activities showed an interaction of game condition and GSF: High-GSF girls showed intensified feminine activity interests only with Barbie; low-GSF girls showed no change with either character. Neither GSF nor game condition affected occupational interests. Implications for GST, individual differences, and occupational interventions are discussed.
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Survival Analysis of Faculty Retention and Promotion in the Social Sciences by Gender
Janet Box-Steffensmeier et al.
PLoS ONE, November 2015
Background: Recruitment and retention of talent is central to the research performance of universities. Existing research shows that, while men are more likely than women to be promoted at the different stages of the academic career, no such difference is found when it comes to faculty retention rates. Current research on faculty retention, however, focuses on careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). We extend this line of inquiry to the social sciences.
Methods: We follow 2,218 tenure-track assistant professors hired since 1990 in seven social science disciplines at nineteen U.S. universities from time of hire to time of departure. We also track their time to promotion to associate and full professor. Using survival analysis, we examine gender differences in time to departure and time to promotion. Our methods account for censoring and unobserved heterogeneity, as well as effect heterogeneity across disciplines and cohorts.
Results: We find no statistically significant differences between genders in faculty retention. However, we do find that men are more likely to be granted tenure than women. When it comes to promotion to full professor, the results are less conclusive, as the effect of gender is sensitive to model specification.
Conclusions: The results corroborate previous findings about gender patterns in faculty retention and promotion. They suggest that advances have been made when it comes to gender equality in retention and promotion, but important differences still persist.
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The gender gap in federal and private support for entrepreneurship
Dora Gicheva & Albert Link
Small Business Economics, December 2015, Pages 729-733
Abstract:
The role of gender in entrepreneurship has been thoroughly investigated. However, less is known about gender differences in access to private investment when attempting to develop a new technology. In this paper, we use data collected by the National Research Council of the National Academies to estimate differences between the probability that a female-owned firm and a male-owned firm, both conducting research funded by the Small Business Innovation Research program, will receive private investment funding to help to commercialize the funded technology. We find that female-owned firms are disadvantaged in their access to private investment, especially in the West and Northeast regions of the USA.
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Fidan Ana Kurtulus
Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, forthcoming
Abstract:
What role has affirmative action played in the growth of minority and female employment in U.S. firms? This paper presents a longitudinal analysis of this question by exploiting rich variation across firms in the timing of federal contracting to identify affirmative action effects over the course of three decades spanning 1973 to 2003. It constitutes the first study to comprehensively document the long-term and dynamic effects of affirmative action in federal contracting on employment composition within firms in the United States. I use a new panel of over 100,000 large private-sector firms from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, including both firms that obtain federal contracts and are therefore mandated to implement affirmative action and firms that are noncontractors, across all industries and regions. The paper's key results indicate that the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action in federal contracting over 1973 to 2003 were black and Native American women and men. Dynamic event study analysis of workforce composition around the time of contracting reveal that a large part of the effect of affirmative action on increasing protected group shares occurred within the first four years of gaining a contract, and that these increased shares persisted even after a firm was no longer a federal contractor. The paper also uncovers important results on how the impact of affirmative action evolved over 1973 to 2003, in particular that the fastest growth in the employment shares of minorities and women at federal contractors relative to noncontracting firms occurred during the 1970s and early 1980s, decelerating substantially in ensuing years.
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Objectification in Action: Self- and Other-Objectification in Mixed-Sex Interpersonal Interactions
Randi Garcia, Valerie Earnshaw & Diane Quinn
Psychology of Women Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although the process of sexual objectification is theorized to occur within interpersonal interactions, we believe this is the first study to examine sexual objectification and self-objectification in actual (nonconfederate) interpersonal encounters. Men and women were brought into the laboratory and interacted in mixed-sex dyads. We used dyadic analysis to detect whether partners’ objectification of each other affected state self-objectification (SSO), and the resulting feelings of comfort and authenticity during the interaction. After the interaction, participants completed a cognitive performance task, a measure of career aspirations, and a measure of relationship agency. Results showed that for women only, being objectified by their male interaction partner was associated with an increase in SSO, and SSO led to perceptions that the interaction was less comfortable and less authentic. Furthermore, for women but not for men, having authentic interactions was found to relate positively to relationship agency, career aspirations, and cognitive performance. This research shows that self-objectification is not only a self-process but an interpersonal process heightened by the real-time sexual objectification of a male interaction partner.
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An Investigation of the Historical Black Wage Premium in Nursing
Nicole Coomer
Review of Black Political Economy, December 2015, Pages 323-335
Abstract:
This paper builds off of prior work analyzing the historical wage premium paid to black registered nurses (RNs) (Coomer, Nurs Econ 31(5):254–259, 2013). The average observed wages of black RNs was higher than that of white RNs in the National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses (NSSRN) over more than two decades from 1984 to 2008. This study examines the wage differential between black and white nurses that remains after controlling for factors likely to affect wages in addition to race, such as experience, education, employer type, and specialty. The differential is decomposed, following Blinder (1973) and Oaxaca (1973), revealing a large unexplained portion. Four possible explanations are examined and support is found for self-selection, experience, shift work, and demand effects.
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Anthony Jerant et al.
Academic Medicine, December 2015, Pages 1667–1674
Purpose: To examine associations of medical school applicant underrepresented minority (URM) status and socioeconomic status (SES) with Multiple Mini-Interview (MMI) invitation and performance and acceptance recommendation.
Method: The authors conducted a correlational study of applicants submitting secondary applications to the University of California, Davis, School of Medicine, 2011–2013. URM applicants were black, Southeast Asian, Native American, Pacific Islander, and/or Hispanic. SES from eight application variables was modeled (0–1 score, higher score = lower SES). Regression analyses examined associations of URM status and SES with MMI invitation (yes/no), MMI score (mean of 10 station ratings, range 0–3), and admission committee recommendation (accept versus not), adjusting for age, sex, and academic performance.
Results: Of 7,964 secondary-application applicants, 19.7% were URM and 15.1% self-designated disadvantaged; 1,420 (17.8%) participated in the MMI and were evaluated for acceptance. URM status was not associated with MMI invitation (OR 1.14; 95% CI 0.98 to 1.33), MMI score (0.00-point difference, CI −0.08 to 0.08), or acceptance recommendation (OR 1.08; CI 0.69 to 1.68). Lower SES applicants were more likely to be invited to an MMI (OR 5.95; CI 4.76 to 7.44) and recommended for acceptance (OR 3.28; CI 1.79 to 6.00), but had lower MMI scores (−0.12 points, CI −0.23 to −0.01).
Conclusions: MMI-based admissions did not disfavor URM applicants. Lower SES applicants had lower MMI scores but were more likely to be invited to an MMI and recommended for acceptance. Multischool collaborations should examine how MMI-based admissions affect URM and lower SES applicants.