Gender and the Labor Market: What Have We Learned from Field and Lab Experiments?

By Ghazala Azmat, Barbara Petrongolo. Social Science Research Network, 2014

368 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We discuss the contribution of the experimental literature to the understanding of both traditional and previously unexplored dimensions of gender differences and discuss their bearings on labor market outcomes. Experiments have offered new findings on gender discrimination, and while they have identified a bias against hiring women in some labor market segments, the discrimination detected in field experiments is less pervasive than that implied by the regression approach. Experiments have also offered new insights into gender differences in preferences: to gain less from negotiation, women appear to have lower preferences than men for risk and competition and may be more sensitive to social cues. These gender differences in preferences also have implications in group settings, whereby the gender composition of a group affects team decisions and performance. Most of the evidence on gender traits comes from the lab, and key open questions remain as to the source of gender preferences—nature versus nurture, or their interaction—and their role, if any, in the workplace.

Subfields: Gender Studies, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4321c7f41dbd959ff411868b56f54a3d2e92d0ec

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Citations in the corpus

Gender Gaps and the Rise of the Service Economy (2017, neutral): “We thus replace production of services (10) by”
Leaning Out: How Negative Recruitment Experiences Shape Women’s Decisions to Compete for Executive Roles (2017, background): “…field research establishes that women face promotion barriers in organizations (Cohen, Broschak, and Haveman, 1998; Barnett, Baron, and Stuart, 2000) and are often disadvantaged in external hiring processes (Petersen and Saporta, 2004; Fernandez-Mateo and King, 2011; Azmat and Petrongolo, 2014).”
Gender gaps and the structure of local labor markets (2020, background): “…towards risk, competition and negotiation, which may interfere with labor market success whenever financially rewarding careers develop in highly-competitive environments, characterized by volatile earnings (see Croson and Gneezy, 2009, Bertrand, 2011, and Azmat and Petrongolo, 2014, for surveys).”
Economic Gains From Gender Inclusion; New Mechanisms, New Evidence (2018, background): “Becker, G. S. 1957.”