Experimental Evidence on Policies Aimed at Closing the Gender Gap in Willingness to Guess on Multiple-Choice Tests

Katherine Baldiga Coffman

Working Paper | 2016

Experimental Evidence on Policies Aimed at Closing the Gender Gap in Willingness to Guess on Multiple-Choice Tests

Abstract

Research has shown that women skip more questions than men on multiple-choice tests with penalties for wrong answers. We propose and test five policy changes aimed at eliminating this source of gender bias in test scores. Our data show that simply removing the penalty for wrong answers reduces the number of questions skipped by test-takers; however, in this treatment, women still skip more questions than men. We identify two other effective interventions, both of which maintain the standard scoring structure of multiple-choice tests (penalties for wrong answers), reduce the number of questions skipped by test-takers, and eliminate the gender gap.

Keywords: Competition; Behavior; Decision Choices and Conditions; Gender;

Language: English

Format: Print

Citation:

Coffman, Katherine Baldiga. "Experimental Evidence on Policies Aimed at Closing the Gender Gap in Willingness to Guess on Multiple-Choice Tests." Working Paper, August 2016.

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.

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Experimental Evidence on Policies Aimed at Closing the Gender Gap in Willingness to Guess on Multiple-Choice Tests

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