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According to a survey of citizens in eight countries, women are much more likely than men to view COVID-19 as a severe health problem. They are also...
- 2021
- Book
Glass Half-Broken: Shattering the Barriers That Still Hold Women Back at Work
By: Colleen Ammerman and Boris Groysberg
Why does the gender gap persist and how can we close it? For years women have made up the majority of college-educated workers in the United States. In 2019, the gap between the percentage of women and the percentage of men in the workforce was the smallest on record....
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- July 2020
- Teaching Plan
Girls Who Code
By: Brian Trelstad and Amy Klopfenstein
This teaching plan serves as a supplement to HBS Case No. 320-055, “Girls Who Code.” Founded 2012 by former lawyer Reshma Saujani, Girls Who Code (GWC) offered coding education programs to middle- and high school-aged girls. The organization also sought to alter...
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Keywords:
Communication;
Communication Strategy;
Spoken Communication;
Interpersonal Communication;
Demographics;
Age;
Gender;
Education;
Curriculum and Courses;
Learning;
Middle School Education;
Secondary Education;
Leadership Style;
Leadership;
Social Enterprise;
Nonprofit Organizations;
Social Psychology;
Attitudes;
Behavior;
Cognition and Thinking;
Prejudice and Bias;
Power and Influence;
Identity;
Social and Collaborative Networks;
Motivation and Incentives;
Society;
Civil Society or Community;
Culture;
Public Opinion;
Social Issues;
Technology;
Software;
Education Industry;
Technology Industry;
North and Central America;
United States
- Article
The Impact of Penalties for Wrong Answers on the Gender Gap in Test Scores
By: Katherine B. Coffman and David Klinowski
Multiple-choice exams play a critical role in university admissions across the world. A key question is whether imposing penalties for wrong answers on these exams deters guessing from women more than men, disadvantaging female test-takers. We consider data from a...
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- March 2020
- Case
Girls Who Code
By: Brian Trelstad, Amy Klopfenstein and Olivia Hull
In 2012, Reshma Saujani founded Girls Who Code (GWC) with the mission of closing the technology (tech) industry’s gender gap. While GWC offered coding education programs to middle- and high-school-aged girls, the organization also sought to alter cultural stereotypes...
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- March 2020
- Article
Knowing When to Ask: The Cost of Leaning-in
By: Christine L. Exley, Muriel Niederle and Lise Vesterlund
Women's reluctance to negotiate is often used to explain the gender wage gap, popularizing the push for women to “lean-in" and negotiate more. Examining an environment where women achieve positive profits when they choose to negotiate, we find that increased...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
The Old Boys' Club: Schmoozing and the Gender Gap
By: Zoë B. Cullen and Ricardo Perez-Truglia
Offices are social places. Employees and managers take coffee breaks together, go to lunch,
hang out over drinks, and talk about family and hobbies. In this study, we provide evidence that
employees’ social interactions with their managers can be advantageous for their...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
When to Apply?
By: Katherine B. Coffman, Manuela Collis and Leena Kulkarni
Labor market outcomes depend, in part, upon an individual’s willingness to put herself forward for different opportunities. We use laboratory and field experiments to explore gender differences in willingness to apply for higher return, more challenging work. We find...
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- 2019
- Working Paper
The Gender Gap in Self-Promotion
By: Christine L Exley and Judd B. Kessler
In applications, interviews, performance reviews, and many other environments, individuals are explicitly asked or implicitly invited to assess their own performance. In a series of experiments, we find that women rate their performance less favorably than equally...
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- September 2019
- Article
Household Matters: Revisiting the Returns to Capital Among Female Microentrepreneurs
By: Arielle Bernhardt, Erica Field, Rohini Pande and Natalia Rigol
Multiple field experiments report positive financial returns to capital shocks for male and not female microentrepreneurs. But these analyses overlook the fact that female entrepreneurs often reside with male entrepreneurs. Using data from experiments in India, Sri...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Networking Frictions in Venture Capital, and the Gender Gap in Entrepreneurship
By: Sabrina T. Howell and Ramana Nanda
We find that male participants in Harvard Business School’s New Venture Competition who were randomly exposed to more VC investors on their panel were substantially more likely to start a VC-backed startup post-graduation, indicating that access to investors impacts...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Equilibrium Effects of Pay Transparency in a Simple Labor Market
By: Zoë B. Cullen and Bobak Pakzad-Hurson
The public discourse around pay transparency has focused on the direct effect: how workers seek
to rectify newly disclosed pay inequities through renegotiations. The question of how wage-setting,
bargaining, and hiring practices change with higher transparency has...
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- March 2019
- Article
Beliefs about Gender
By: Pedro Bordalo, Katherine Baldiga Coffman, Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer
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...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Stereotypes and Belief Updating
By: Katherine B. Coffman, Manuela Collis and Leena Kulkarni
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...
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Keywords:
Beliefs;
Stereotypes;
Self-assessment;
Gender;
Prejudice and Bias;
Information;
Performance;
Perception
- 2018
- Working Paper
When Harry Fired Sally: The Double Standard in Punishing Misconduct
By: Mark Egan, Gregor Matvos and Amit Seru
We examine gender differences in misconduct punishment in the financial advisory industry. We find evidence of a "gender punishment gap": following an incident of misconduct, female advisers are 20% more likely to lose their jobs and 30% less likely to find new jobs...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
The Salary Taboo: Privacy Norms and the Diffusion of Information
By: Zoë B. Cullen and Ricardo Perez-Truglia
The limited diffusion of salary information has implications for labor markets, such as wage discrimination policies and collective bargaining. Access to salary information is believed to be limited and unequal, but there is little direct evidence on the sources of...
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- September 2018 (Revised March 2019)
- Background Note
The Gender Gap In U.S. History
By: Tom Nicholas and Sophie Kainen
- May–June 2018
- Article
What Most People Get Wrong about Men and Women: Research Shows the Sexes Aren't So Different
By: Catherine H. Tinsley and Robin J. Ely
Why have women failed to achieve parity with men in the workplace? Contrary to popular belief, it’s not because women prioritize their families over their careers, negotiate poorly, lack confidence, or are too risk averse. Meta-analyses of published studies show that...
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- April 2018
- Article
We Ask Men to Win & Women Not to Lose: Closing the Gender Gap in Startup Funding
By: Dana Kanze, Laura Huang, Mark Conley and E. Tory Higgins
Male entrepreneurs are known to raise higher levels of funding than their female counterparts, but the underlying mechanism for this funding disparity remains contested. Drawing upon Regulatory Focus Theory, we propose that the gap originates with a gender bias in the...
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- February 2018
- Article
Laboratory Evidence on the Effects of Sponsorship on the Competitive Preferences of Men and Women
By: Nancy R. Baldiga and Katherine Baldiga Coffman
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...
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- 2016
- Working Paper
Experimental Evidence on Policies Aimed at Closing the Gender Gap in Willingness to Guess on Multiple-Choice Tests
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...
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