Gender
Differences: The Role of Institutions
"Large gender differences in the
propensity to choose challenging tasks
appear to be driven by gender
differences in risk aversion and in confidence about the ability to perform a
new and potentially difficult task."
Although women have made significant
advances in catching up economically with men, gender differences in wages and
in representation in high-profile jobs remain. The psychological literature
suggests that women and men may differ in ways that affect economic decisions
such as their self-perception of ability. Furthermore, perceptions of
competence are intimately tied to expectations, aspirations, persistence, and
the preference for challenging tasks. Women may not only be less certain about
their abilities but also more risk averse, and less willing to explore and test
their abilities. If women and men have different perceptions about their
abilities to perform in new environments, and different tendencies to act on
such perceptions, then they are likely to make different choices. If women shy
away from more challenging tasks, they may be underrepresented relative to
their actual abilities, which in turn may result in gender differences in
economic outcomes.
In Gender Differences in Seeking Challenges:
The Role of Institutions (NBER Working Paper No. 13922:
http://www.nber.org/papers/w13922.pdf),
authors Muriel Niederle[1] and Alexandra Yestrumskas[2] first ask whether for a
given ability women and men differ in their preference
to perform a more challenging task. They then study the impact of these
differences on economic outcomes, and place special emphasis on understanding
the underlying causes. They also investigate which changes in institutions can
affect the choices of women and men, such that those choices will reflect the
participants' performance levels rather than their gender. As such, the
authors' research is part of the growing literature on the effect of
non-cognitive skills and attitudes, and how gender differences in these skills
and attitudes affect economic outcomes.
Niederle and her co-author find that strong
preferences for the characteristics of the task (including the feedback that
participants can receive about their ability level from performing various
tasks) alone cannot explain the choices of women and men. Gender differences in
preferences for challenging tasks are driven by differences in certainty about
one's ability to perform in more challenging environments, or by differences in
attitudes toward specific risks, or by uncertainty in general. For example,
women may be more uncertain than men in their belief that they can perform at a
high level. This could be driven by gender differences in beliefs about how
much performance of the initial task corresponds to luck versus real ability,
for example. Specifically, women may attribute success to luck and failure to
ability, while men attribute success to ability and failure to luck.
As the authors point out, only by
understanding gender differences can policymakers start to design institutions
that will accommodate both genders. Simple changes in institutions can have a
big effect on the self-selection of women and men. For example, the authors
predict that reducing the expectation of up-front commitment may especially
help high performing women to move into harder and more challenging tasks.
Ability alone cannot explain the absence of
women in male dominated fields. In natural settings, issues such as
discrimination, the amount of time devoted to the profession, and the desire of
women to raise children may provide some explanation for the choices of women.
However, the authors examine an environment in which women and men perform
equally well, and in which issues of discrimination, or time spent on the job
do not have any explanatory power. Even so, they find large gender differences
in the propensity to choose challenging tasks, with men choosing the hard task
on average 50 percent more often than women, for any given performance level.
These differences appear to be driven by gender differences in risk aversion
and in confidence about the ability to perform a new and potentially difficult
task.
________________________________
[1] Department of Economics, Stanford University.
[2] Harvard Law School, Harvard University.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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Berdikusi dg Santun & Elegan, dg Semangat Persahabatan. Menuju Indonesia yg
Lebih Baik, in Commonality & Shared Destiny.
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