The Gender Gap in Confidence: Expected but Not Accounted For
- Creators
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Exley, Christine L.
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Nielsen, Kirby
Abstract
We investigate how the gender gap in confidence affects the views that evaluators (e.g., employers) hold about men and women. We find the confidence gap is contagious, causing evaluators to form overly pessimistic beliefs about women. This result arises even though the confidence gap is expected and even though the confidence gap shouldn't be contagious if evaluators are Bayesian. Only an intervention that facilitates Bayesian updating proves (somewhat) effective. Additional results highlight how similar findings follow even when there is no room for discriminatory motives or differences in priors because evaluators are asked about arbitrary, rather than gender-specific, groups.
Copyright and License
© 2024 American Economic Association.
Acknowledgement
We thank Zoë Cullen, Oliver Hauser, Judd Kessler, Muriel Niederle, Ryan Oprea, Emma Ronzetti, Colin Sullivan, Stephen Terry, Lise Vesterlund, and many seminar participants for helpful comments and suggestions. We are grateful to three anonymous referees for suggestions that greatly improved the paper.
Ethics
This study was reviewed by the Institutional Review Board at Harvard Business School under protocol number IRB22-0059.
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