Stereotypes and Belief Updating

We explore how feedback shapes, and perpetuates, gender gaps in self-assessments. Participants in our experiments take tests of their ability across different domains. Absent feedback, beliefs of own ability are strongly influenced by gender stereotypes: holding own ability fixed, individuals are more confident in more gender congruent domains (i.e. more male-typed for men, more female-typed for women). After feedback, stereotypes continue to shape posterior beliefs, even beyond what a Bayesian model would predict. This is primarily because both men and women update their beliefs more positively in response to good news when it arrives in a more gender congruent domain.