The Gender Gap in Self-Promotion

By Christine L. Exley, Judd B. Kessler. 2019

118 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In applications, interviews, performance reviews, and many other environments, individuals are explicitly asked or implicitly invited to evaluate their own performance and ability. In a series of experiments, involving over 4,000 participants, we find that women evaluate their performance less favorably than equally performing men. This gender gap in self-evaluations is notably persistent. It persists when we fully inform individuals about their absolute and relative performance (closing any gender gap in performance beliefs) and when we eliminate financial consequences of self-evaluations (removing incentives to distort self-evaluations). It is robust to providing information about the average self-evaluations of others and to introducing a chance that true performance will be revealed. However, there is no gap when men and women evaluate others rather than themselves, suggesting the gender gap is specifically driven by evaluating oneself. Given that self-evaluations of performance and ability can affect myriad economic outcomes, this gender gap may contribute to persistent gender gaps in educational and labor market environments.

Subfields: Gender Studies, Public Administration, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/42452257ec13d6989f544177ac301a414dc4db78

Citations in the corpus

• Flexible Wages, Bargaining, and the Gender Gap (2020, unknown): “…Based on the findings of other papers showing that women tend to be less confident in their abilities and less likely to self promote (Exley and Kessler, 2019), we ask a series of questions about one’s comfort with negotiating, beliefs about backlash, and beliefs about the…”