Laboratory Evidence on the Effects of Sponsorship on the Competitive Preferences of Men and Women

Nancy R.  Baldiga; Katherine Baldiga Coffman

Article | Management Science | February 2018

Laboratory Evidence on the Effects of Sponsorship on the Competitive Preferences of Men and Women

by Nancy R. Baldiga and Katherine Baldiga Coffman

Abstract

Sponsorship programs have been proposed as one way to promote female advancement in competitive career fields. A sponsor is someone who advocates for a protégé, and in doing so, takes a stake in her success. We use a laboratory experiment to explore two channels through which sponsorship has been posited to increase advancement in a competitive workplace. In our setting, being sponsored provides a vote of confidence and/or creates a link between the protégé’s and sponsor’s payoffs. We find that both features of sponsorship significantly increase willingness to compete among men on average, while neither of these channels significantly increases willingness to compete among women on average. As a result, sponsorship does not close the gender gap in competitiveness or earnings. We discuss how these insights from the laboratory could help to inform the design of sponsorship programs in the field.

Keywords: economics; behavior and behavioral decision making; laboratory experiment; Competition; Organizations; Gender; Behavior;

Format: Print

Find at Harvard

Citation:

Baldiga, Nancy R., and Katherine Baldiga Coffman. "Laboratory Evidence on the Effects of Sponsorship on the Competitive Preferences of Men and Women." Management Science 64, no. 2 (February 2018): 888–901.

We conduct laboratory experiments that explore how gender stereotypes shape beliefs about ability of oneself and others in different categories of knowledge. The data reveal two patterns. First, men’s and women’s beliefs about both oneself and others exceed observed ability on average, particularly in difficult tasks. Second, overestimation of ability by both men and women varies across categories. To understand these patterns, we develop a model that separates gender stereotypes from misestimation of ability related to the difficulty of the task. We find that stereotypes contribute to gender gaps in self-confidence, assessments of others, and behavior in a cooperative game.

We run an experiment that features a novel task with deliberation to explore how stereotypes shape group decision-making. We find that women are less likely to be rewarded for their ideas in male-typed domains when gender is known. This is partly due to discrimination and partly due to differences in self-promotion. External analysis of the chat data provides further insights. Though men and women do not vary in their communication styles, coders display pervasive stereotypes, associating warmth with women and competence and negativity with men. We also find that warmer participants, particularly warmer women, are under-rewarded by their groups.

We explore how beliefs respond to noisy information about own ability across a range of tasks, with a particular focus on how gender stereotypes impact belief updating. Participants in our experiments take tests of their ability across different domains. Absent feedback, beliefs of own ability are strongly influenced by gender stereotypes. We then provide noisy feedback about own absolute performance to participants and elicit posterior beliefs. Gender stereotypes have significant predictive power for posterior beliefs, both through their influence on prior beliefs (as predicted by a Bayesian model) and through their influence on updating. Both men and women’s beliefs are more responsive to information in gender congruent domains than gender incongruent domains. This is primarily driven by differential reactions to exogenously received good news about own ability: both men and women react more to good news when it arrives in a gender congruent domain than when it arrives in a gender incongruent domain. Our results have important implications for understanding how feedback shapes gender gaps in self-assessments.

Faculty & Research

Laboratory Evidence on the Effects of Sponsorship on the Competitive Preferences of Men and Women

Abstract

Citation:

About the Author

More from the Author