Underrepresented
Racial Segregation Patterns in Selective Universities
Peter Arcidiacono et al.
Journal of Law and Economics, November 2013, Pages 1039-1060
Abstract:
This paper examines sorting into interracial friendships at selective universities. We show significant friendship segregation, particularly for blacks. Indeed, blacks’ friendships are no more diverse in college than in high school, despite the fact that the colleges that blacks attend have substantially smaller black populations. We demonstrate that the segregation patterns occur in part because affirmative action results in large differences in the academic backgrounds of students of different races, with students preferring to form friendships with those of similar academic backgrounds. Within a school, stronger academic backgrounds make whites’ friendships with blacks less likely and friendships with Asians more likely. These results suggest that affirmative action admission policies at selective universities, which drive a wedge between the academic characteristics of different racial groups, may result in increased within-school segregation.
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Sreedhari Desai, Dolly Chugh & Arthur Brief
Administrative Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Based on five studies with a total of 993 married, heterosexual male participants, we found that marriage structure has important implications for attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors related to gender among heterosexual married men in the workplace. Specifically, men in traditional marriages — married to women who are not employed — disfavor women in the workplace and are more likely than the average of all married men to make decisions that prevent the advancement of qualified women. Results show that employed men in traditional marriages tend to (a) view the presence of women in the workplace unfavorably, (b) perceive that organizations with higher numbers of female employees are operating less smoothly, (c) perceive organizations with female leaders as relatively unattractive, and (d) deny qualified female employees opportunities for promotions more frequently than do other married male employees. Moreover, our final study suggests that men who are single and then marry women who are not employed may change their attitudes toward women in the workplace, becoming less positive. The consistent pattern of results across multiple studies employing multiple methods (lab, longitudinal, archival) and samples (U.S., U.K., undergraduates, managers) demonstrates the robustness of our findings that the structure of a man’s marriage influences his gender ideology in the workplace, presenting an important challenge to workplace egalitarianism.
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How Judicial Qualification Ratings May Disadvantage Minority and Female Candidates
Maya Sen
Journal of Law and Courts, Spring 2014, Pages 33-65
Abstract:
This article uses two newly collected data sets to investigate the reliance by political actors on the external vetting of judicial candidates, in particular vetting conducted by the nation’s largest legal organization, the American Bar Association (ABA). Using these data, I show that minority and female nominees are more likely than whites and males to receive lower ratings, even after controlling for education, experience, and partisanship via matching. These discrepancies are important for two reasons. First, as I show, receiving poor ABA ratings is correlated with confirmation failure. Second, I demonstrate that ABA ratings do not actually predict whether judges will be “better” in terms of reversal rates. Taken together, these findings complicate the ABA’s influential role in judicial nominations, both in terms of setting up possible barriers against minority and female candidates and also in terms of its actual utility in predicting judicial performance.
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David Pedulla
Social Psychology Quarterly, March 2014, Pages 75-94
Abstract:
How do marginalized social categories, such as being black and gay, combine with one another in the production of discrimination? While much extant research assumes that combining marginalized social categories results in a “double disadvantage,” I argue that in the case of race and sexual orientation the opposite may be true. This article posits that stereotypes about gay men as effeminate and weak will counteract common negative stereotypes held by whites that black men are threatening and criminal. Thus, I argue that being gay will have negative consequences for white men in the job application process, but that being gay will actually have positive consequences for black men in this realm. This hypothesis is tested using data from a survey experiment in which respondents were asked to evaluate resumes for a job opening where the race and sexual orientation of the applicants were experimentally manipulated. The findings contribute to important theoretical debates about stereotypes, discrimination, and intersecting social identities.
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“Boys Can Be Anything”: Effect of Barbie Play on Girls’ Career Cognitions
Aurora Sherman & Eileen Zurbriggen
Sex Roles, March 2014, Pages 195-208
Abstract:
Play with Barbie dolls is an understudied source of gendered socialization that may convey a sexualized adult world to young girls. Early exposure to sexualized images may have unintended consequences in the form of perceived limitations on future selves. We investigated perceptions of careers girls felt they could do in the future as compared to the number of careers they felt boys could do as a function of condition (playing with a Barbie or Mrs. Potato Head doll) and type of career (male dominated or female dominated) in a sample of 37 U.S. girls aged 4–7 years old residing in the Pacific Northwest. After a randomly assigned 5-min exposure to condition, children were asked how many of ten different occupations they themselves could do in the future and how many of those occupations a boy could do. Data were analyzed with a 2 × 2 × 2 mixed factorial ANOVA. Averaged across condition, girls reported that boys could do significantly more occupations than they could themselves, especially when considering male-dominated careers. In addition, girls’ ideas about careers for themselves compared to careers for boys interacted with condition, such that girls who played with Barbie indicated that they had fewer future career options than boys, whereas girls who played with Mrs. Potato Head reported a smaller difference between future possible careers for themselves as compared to boys. Results support predictions from gender socialization and objectification theories.
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Richard Fox & Jennifer Lawless
Journal of Politics, April 2014, Pages 398-414
Abstract:
Based on data from the 2011 Citizen Political Ambition Study — a national survey of nearly 4,000 “potential candidates” for all levels of office — we provide the first thorough analysis of the manner in which traditional family arrangements affect the initial decision to run for office. Our findings reveal that traditional family dynamics do not account for the gender gap in political ambition. Neither marital and parental status, nor the division of labor pertaining to household tasks and child care, predicts potential candidates’ political ambition. This is not to downplay the fact that the gender gap in political ambition remains substantial and static or that traditional family roles affect whether women make it into the candidate eligibility pool in the first place. But it is to suggest that family arrangements are not a primary factor explaining why female potential candidates exhibit lower levels of political ambition than do men. Because women remain less likely than men to exhibit political ambition even in the face of stringent controls, the lack of explanatory power conferred by family arrangements highlights that other barriers to women’s emergence as candidates clearly merit continued investigation.
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Investors prefer entrepreneurial ventures pitched by attractive men
Alison Wood Brooks et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 25 March 2014, Pages 4427–4431
Abstract:
Entrepreneurship is a central path to job creation, economic growth, and prosperity. In the earliest stages of start-up business creation, the matching of entrepreneurial ventures to investors is critically important. The entrepreneur’s business proposition and previous experience are regarded as the main criteria for investment decisions. Our research, however, documents other critical criteria that investors use to make these decisions: the gender and physical attractiveness of the entrepreneurs themselves. Across a field setting (three entrepreneurial pitch competitions in the United States) and two experiments, we identify a profound and consistent gender gap in entrepreneur persuasiveness. Investors prefer pitches presented by male entrepreneurs compared with pitches made by female entrepreneurs, even when the content of the pitch is the same. This effect is moderated by male physical attractiveness: attractive males were particularly persuasive, whereas physical attractiveness did not matter among female entrepreneurs.
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Facial Attractiveness and Lifetime Earnings: Evidence from a Cohort Study
John Karl Scholz & Kamil Sicinski
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We use unique longitudinal data to document an economically and statistically significant positive correlation between the facial attractiveness of male high school graduates and their subsequent labor market earnings. There are only weak links between facial attractiveness and direct measures of cognitive skills and no link between facial attractiveness and mortality. Even after including a lengthy set of characteristics, including IQ, high school activities, proxy measures for confidence and personality, family background and additional respondent characteristics in an empirical model of earnings, the attractiveness premium is present in the respondents' mid-30s and early-50s. Our findings are consistent with attractiveness being an enduring, positive labor market characteristic.
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Rank influences human sex differences in dyadic cooperation
Joyce Benenson, Henry Markovits & Richard Wrangham
Current Biology, 3 March 2014, Pages R190-R191
Abstract:
Unrelated human males regularly interact in groups, which can include higher and lower ranked individuals. In contrast, from early childhood through adulthood, females often reduce group size in order to interact with only one individual of equal rank. In many species, when either sex maintains a group structure, unrelated individuals must cooperate with those differing in rank. Given that human males interact more than females in groups, we hypothesized that dyadic cooperation between individuals of differing rank should occur more frequently between human males than females. We examined this hypothesis in academic psychology. Numbers of co-authored peer-reviewed publications were used as an objective measure of cooperation, and professorial status as a measure of rank. We compiled all publications co-authored by full professors with same-sex departmental colleagues over four years in 50 North American universities, and calculated the likelihood of co-authorship in relation to the number of available professors in the same department. Among those of equal status (full professors) there was no gender difference for likelihood of co-authorship: women and men were equally likely to co-author publications with another full professor of the same gender. In contrast, male full professors were more likely than female full professors to co-author publications with a same-gender assistant professor. This is consistent with a tendency for men to cooperate more than women with same-sex individuals of differing rank.
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Gender Differences in Leadership Role Occupancy: The Mediating Role of Power Motivation
Sebastian Schuh et al.
Journal of Business Ethics, March 2014, Pages 363-379
Abstract:
Although the proportion of women in leadership positions has grown over the past decades, women are still underrepresented in leadership roles, which poses an ethical challenge to society at large but business in particular. Accordingly, a growing body of research has attempted to unravel the reasons for this inequality. Besides theoretical progress, a central goal of these studies is to inform measures targeted at increasing the share of women in leadership positions. Striving to contribute to these efforts and drawing on several theoretical approaches, the present study provides a contemporary examination of (a) whether women and men differ in their levels of power motivation and (b) whether potential gender differences in this motivation contribute to the unequal distribution of women and men in leadership positions. Results from four studies provide converging support for these assumptions. Specifically, we found that women consistently reported lower power motivation than men. This in turn mediated the link between gender and leadership role occupancy. These results were robust to several methodological variations including samples from different populations (i.e., student samples and large heterogeneous samples of employee), diverse operationalizations of power motivation and leadership role occupancy (self- and other ratings), and study design (cross-sectional and time-lagged designs). Implications for theory and practice, including ways to contribute to a more equal gender distribution in leadership positions, are discussed.
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The Effect of Stereotype Threat on Group Versus Individual Performance
Nicholas Aramovich
Small Group Research, April 2014, Pages 176-197
Abstract:
Stereotype threat has been one of the most studied topics in social psychology in recent years. This research shows that subtle reminders of stereotypes about one’s social category hurt task performance — an effect replicated across several stereotypes and performance domains. Despite extensive research on individual performance, it is unknown how stereotype threat affects group performance. A question of theoretical and practical importance is whether people who face a common stereotype can overcome it by working together. To answer this question, an experiment was conducted comparing the performance of individual women and groups of women on a math/logic problem when faced with a stereotype threat. Results indicated that when facing a stereotype threat, groups outperformed the best individuals and performed just as well as non-threatened groups. This effect was due to threatened groups avoiding problem-solving errors. The implications for understanding group versus individual performance when facing stereotype threats are discussed.
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How stereotypes impair women’s careers in science
Ernesto Reuben, Paola Sapienza & Luigi Zingales
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 25 March 2014, Pages 4403–4408
Abstract:
Women outnumber men in undergraduate enrollments, but they are much less likely than men to major in mathematics or science or to choose a profession in these fields. This outcome often is attributed to the effects of negative sex-based stereotypes. We studied the effect of such stereotypes in an experimental market, where subjects were hired to perform an arithmetic task that, on average, both genders perform equally well. We find that without any information other than a candidate’s appearance (which makes sex clear), both male and female subjects are twice more likely to hire a man than a woman. The discrimination survives if performance on the arithmetic task is self-reported, because men tend to boast about their performance, whereas women generally underreport it. The discrimination is reduced, but not eliminated, by providing full information about previous performance on the task. By using the Implicit Association Test, we show that implicit stereotypes are responsible for the initial average bias in sex-related beliefs and for a bias in updating expectations when performance information is self-reported. That is, employers biased against women are less likely to take into account the fact that men, on average, boast more than women about their future performance, leading to suboptimal hiring choices that remain biased in favor of men.
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Cross-Assignment Discrimination in Pay: A Test Case of Major League Baseball
Őrn Bodvarsson, Kerry Papps & John Sessions
Labour Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
The traditional Becker/Arrow style model of discrimination depicts majority and minority workers as perfectly substitutable inputs, implying that all workers have the same job assignment. The model is only appropriate for determining whether pay differences between, for example, whites and non-whites doing job assignment A are attributable to prejudice (‘within-assignment discrimination’); It is inappropriate, however, for determining whether pay differences between whites in job assignment A and non-whites in job assignment B reflect discriminatory behaviour (‘cross-assignment discrimination’). We test the model of such cross assignment discrimination developed by Bodvarsson and Sessions (2011) using data on Major League Baseball hitters and pitchers for four different seasons during the 1990s, a decade during which monopsony power fell. We find strong evidence of ceteris paribus racial pay differences between hitters and pitchers, as well as evidence that cross-assignment discrimination varies with labour market structure.
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Sexist Behavior Undermines Women’s Performance in a Job Application Situation
Sabine Koch, Stefan Konigorski & Monika Sieverding
Sex Roles, February 2014, Pages 79-87
Abstract:
Can sexist behavior in a job application context threaten women and cause them to underperform on a subsequent cognitive ability test? In a simulated job interview, 46 women and 46 men -- undergraduate and graduate students from the University of Heidelberg, Germany -- were confronted with either sexist (dominant and physically close) behavior by a male interviewer or non-sexist (friendly and neutral) behavior by the same confederate. Participants then solved math items and language-related items from a German standard intelligence test. In accordance with our hypothesis, the results indicated that female participants in the sexist condition performed significantly worse on the mathematical test than female participants in the control condition. The performance of female participants on the language-related test and male participants on both the math and language-related tests did not differ by experimental condition. After the sexist job interview, women’s impaired performance, occurring on the math items only (i.e., specific to the domain in which women are negatively stereotyped), suggests an influence of psychological and interpersonal processes on seemingly objective test outcomes.
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Attributional gender bias: Teachers’ ability and effort explanations for students’ math performance
Penelope Espinoza, Ana Arêas da Luz Fontes & Clarissa Arms-Chavez
Social Psychology of Education, March 2014, Pages 105-126
Abstract:
Research is presented on the attributional gender bias: the tendency to generate different attributions (explanations) for female versus male students’ performance in math. Whereas boys’ successes in math are attributed to ability, girls’ successes are attributed to effort; conversely, boys’ failures in math are attributed to a lack of effort and girls’ failures to a lack of ability. This bias has been shown in previous research to be committed by teachers, parents, and students themselves. The present work sought to investigate whether this bias among secondary school math teachers might be reduced over time through adoption of an incremental theory of intelligence. Findings revealed at baseline, teachers committed the expected bias in reference to their high-achieving students’ math performance. Following exposure to stimuli, teachers in both experimental and control conditions reduced this bias. Unexpectedly, teachers across conditions showed a type of compensation for the bias by reversing stereotypical attributions for girls’ and boys’ successes and failures in math. Further, participants relapsed to the original bias nearly a year later. Findings indicate the potential to modify attributional gender bias, but also the challenges for achieving long-term changes within school contexts and for emphasizing effort beyond ability in math performance.
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Paul Hanselman et al.
Sociology of Education, April 2014, Pages 106-124
Abstract:
Schools with very few and relatively low-performing marginalized students may be most likely to trigger social identity threats (including stereotype threats) that contribute to racial disparities. We test this hypothesis by assessing variation in the benefits of a self-affirmation intervention designed to counteract social identity threat in a randomized trial in all 11 middle schools in Madison, Wisconsin. We find that school context moderates the benefits of self-affirmation for black and Hispanic students’ grades, with partial support among standardized achievement outcomes. Self-affirmation reduced the very large racial achievement gap in overall grade point average by 12.5 percent in high-threat school contexts and had no effect in low-threat contexts. These self-affirmation activities have the potential to help close some of the largest racial/ethnic achievement gaps, though only in specific school contexts.
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The Impact of Israel's Class-Based Affirmative Action Policy on Admission and Academic Outcomes
Sigal Alon & Ofer Malamud
Economics of Education Review, June 2014, Pages 123–139
Abstract:
In the early to mid-2000s, four flagship Israeli selective universities introduced a voluntary need-blind and color-blind affirmative action policy for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. The program allowed departments to offer admission to academically borderline applicants who were above a certain threshold of disadvantage. We examine the effect of eligibility for affirmative action on admission and enrollment outcomes as well as on academic achievement using a regression discontinuity (RD) design. We show that students who were just barely eligible for this voluntary policy had a significantly higher probability of admission and enrollment, as compared to otherwise similar students. The affirmative action program also led to higher rates of admission to the most selective majors. Moreover, after enrollment, AA-eligible students are not falling behind academically, even at the most selective majors. Our results suggest the potential for a long-lasting impact of class-based preferences in admission on social and economic mobility.
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Height and Earnings: The Role of Cognitive and Noncognitive Skills
Petter Lundborg, Paul Nystedt & Dan-Olof Rooth
Journal of Human Resources, Winter 2014, Pages 141-166
Abstract:
We use large-scale register data on 450,000 Swedish males who underwent mandatory military enlistment at age 18, and a subsample of 150,000 siblings, to examine why tall people earn more. We show the importance of both cognitive and noncognitive skills, as well as family background and muscular strength for the height-earnings relationship. In addition, we show that a substantial height premium remains after these factors have been accounted for, which originates from very short people having low earnings. This is mostly explained by the sorting of short people into low-paid occupations, which may indicate discrimination by stature.
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Testosterone is associated with self-employment among Australian men
Francis Greene et al.
Economics & Human Biology, March 2014, Pages 76–84
Abstract:
Testosterone has pronounced effects on men's physiological development and smaller, more nuanced, impacts on their economic behavior. In this study of 1199 Australian adult males, we investigate the relationship between the self-employed and their serum testosterone levels. Because prior studies have identified that testosterone is a hormone that is responsive to external factors (e.g. competition, risk-taking), we explicitly control for omitted variable bias and reverse causality by using an instrumental variable approach. We use insulin as our primary instrument to account for endogeneity between testosterone and self-employment. This is because prior research has identified a relationship between insulin and testosterone but not between insulin and self-employment. Our results show that there is a positive association between total testosterone and self-employment. Robustness checks using bioavailable testosterone and another similar instrument (daily alcohol consumption) confirm this positive finding.
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Gender Differences in Experimental Wage Negotiations
Marcus Dittrich, Andreas Knabe & Kristina Leipold
Economic Inquiry, April 2014, Pages 862–873
Abstract:
We examine behavioral gender differences and gender pairing effects in a laboratory experiment with face-to-face alternating-offers wage bargaining. Our results suggest that gender differences in bargaining behavior are role-dependent. We find that women obtain worse bargaining outcomes than men when they take on the role of employees, but not when they act as employers. Differences in bargaining outcomes can be explained by the bargaining parties' initial offers and counteroffers. We do not find evidence for behavioral differences between men and women in the process of alternating offers after first offers and counteroffers are made.
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Dan Chiaburu et al.
Sex Roles, March 2014, Pages 183-194
Abstract:
We examined the extent to which observers’ expectations of target employees’ civic virtue organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) are a function of both observer- (gender stereotype activation, threat) and target-related (gender) influences. Consistent with a role congruity perspective, we proposed that civic virtue (constructive involvement in the political governance process of the organization) will be expected to a lesser extent of women, but only when gender stereotypes are activated. We confirm this hypothesis across two studies. In Study 1, based on a sample of 187 U.S. undergraduate students (101 women, 86 men), we show that less civic virtue is expected of women when observers’ gender stereotypes are experimentally activated (vs. the non-activated condition). Using an additional sample of 197 U.S. undergraduate students (Study 2; 118 women, 79 men), we extend our findings by demonstrating that less civic virtue was expected of women in a high (vs. low) threat (manipulated) condition. Findings for men are included for comparative and general informational purposes only. We observed no significant changes in civic virtue expectations for men due to our study manipulations. Our research extends prior studies by showing that expectations for civic virtue are diminished for women, but only when gender stereotypes and threat are activated.
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Gender Structure and the Effects of Management Citizenship Behavior
Charles Brody, Beth Rubin & David Maume
Social Forces, forthcoming
Abstract:
We draw on gender structure theory, along with ideas about stereotyping and status characteristics, to develop hypotheses about how the gendered behaviors of male and female managers differentially impact the organizational commitment and mental health of their employees. We predict that the generally positive effects of management citizenship behaviors (Hodson 1999) will be less so in the case of female managers, especially for their male employees. Analyses of the 2002 National Survey of the Changing Workforce provide substantial support for our hypotheses despite the fact that we find no significant differences in the perceived management citizenship behaviors of male and female managers. We discuss the importance of these findings for organizational inequality and their relevance to ongoing discussion of the “stalled revolution” in gender equality.
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Gendering Abbottabad: Agency and Hegemonic Masculinity in an Age of Global Terrorism
Lori Poloni-Staudinger & Candice Ortbals
Gender Issues, March 2014, Pages 34-57
Abstract:
During the week after the United States’ raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in May 2011, the media discussed women associated with the raid. Media reported that bin Laden hid “behind a woman” during the raid, describing bin Laden’s wife as a human shield. The press also discussed a photo of the Situation Room during the raid, calling attention to Hillary Clinton, who was thought to be gasping out of emotion in the photo. The narratives surrounding Amal Ahmed al-Sadah (married to bin Laden) and Secretary Clinton elicit insights into the place of gender vis-à-vis terrorism. In this paper, we content analyze non-op-ed newswires, debating how/whether the media framed al-Sadah and Clinton as political agents, feminine representations, and/or as superfluous to terrorism. We find that the press described Clinton as emotional and largely saw al-Sadah as passive and generically as a wife. Women were portrayed differently than men, who are considered active, but unemotional. Additionally, articles critiqued President Obama’s posture and clothing in the Situation Room and disparaged Osama bin Laden for unmanliness. We therefore conclude that the mainstream, print media press prioritizes hegemonic masculinity when discussing terrorism, overlooking women’s agency and ascribing feminine identities to women and marginalized masculinities to certain men.
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Aparna Joshi
Administrative Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using a round-robin data set assembled from over 60 teams of more than 500 scientists and engineers across a variety of science and engineering disciplines, as well as longitudinal research productivity data, this study examines differences in how men and women in science and engineering teams evaluate their colleagues’ expertise and how that affects team performance. Because these teams are assembled to enhance innovations, they are most productive if they fully utilize the expertise of all team members. Applying a social relations modeling approach, two studies conducted in multidisciplinary research centers in a large public U.S. university test whether a team’s gender composition predicts how well women’s expertise is used within the team, based on peer evaluations of male and female team members with varying education levels. A third study returns to the same two research centers to examine whether the larger context in which the team operates affects the use of expertise and the team’s productivity. An important finding is that the gender and educational attributes of the person being evaluated are less critical to the recognition of expertise than the attributes of the person conducting the evaluation and the relationship between these two team members. In addition, context matters: gender-integrated teams with a higher proportion of highly educated women are more productive in disciplines with a greater female faculty representation.
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“You're in the Army Now:” The Impact of World War II on Women's Education, Work, and Family
Taylor Jaworski
Journal of Economic History, March 2014, Pages 169-195
Abstract:
World War II temporarily halted the rise in high school and college graduation rates. This article shows that manpower mobilization for World War II decreased educational attainment among high school-age females during the early 1940s, reduced employment and earnings, and altered decisions regarding family formation. I then provide evidence that women in this cohort returned to school in later life and relate these findings to the “quiet revolution” taking place as women learned about the benefits of school and work over the second half of the twentieth century.
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George Wilson & David Maume
Social Science Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Within the context of the “particularistic mobility thesis” we examine racial differences in the incidence, and determinants of, as well as timing to, mobility into management across the critical early career years at a refined level, namely, when groups share similar white collar and blue collar jobs. Findings from a Panel Study of Income Dynamics sample of men support theory and indicate that from both job levels a racial hierarchy exists: African Americans have the lowest rate of mobility, reach management through a route that is relatively formal and structured by a traditional range of stratification-based causal factors and take longest to reach management. Whites, in contrast, have the highest mobility rate, reach management through a relatively informal path that is less structured by traditional stratification-based factors, and reach management the quickest, and, across all three issues Latinos occupy an intermediate ground between African Americans and Latinos. Further, as predicted by theory, racial differences, particularly, relative to whites, are greater among those tracked from blue collar jobs than white collar jobs. Discussed are implications of the findings for understanding racial disadvantage in the American labor market across the work-career and on an inter-generational basis.
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Student Portfolios and the College Admissions Problem
Hector Chade, Gregory Lewis & Lones Smith
Review of Economic Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
We develop a decentralized Bayesian model of college admissions with two ranked colleges, heterogeneous students and two realistic match frictions: students find it costly to apply to college, and college evaluations of their applications are uncertain. Students thus face a portfolio choice problem in their application decision, while colleges choose admissions standards that act like market-clearing prices. Enrollment at each college is affected by the standards at the other college through student portfolio reallocation. In equilibrium, student-college sorting may fail: weaker students sometimes apply more aggressively, and the weaker college might impose higher standards. Applying our framework, we analyze affirmative action, showing how it induces minority applicants to construct their application portfolios as if they were majority students of higher caliber.