To support rigorous research, GATE offers annual research grants to qualified applicants.
2023-2024 Grant Recipients
Gender Differences in Job Application Strategies: An Experimental Investigation
There is a significant gender gap in earnings for young workers that persists even when controlling for educational qualifications, field of study, and industry and occupational choices. While there is significant literature investigating why men and women select different types of jobs, relatively little is known about how men and women interact with the job application process itself. General research into gender differences in risk tolerance, competition preferences and subjective self-assessments suggest that female applicants may adopt more conservative application strategies, forgoing applications to higher-paying, more competitive jobs in favour of lower-paying, safer positions. Recent research analyzing graduating undergraduate business students documents differences in earnings between genders, in part due to gender differences in search and application behaviours. Women were found to receive a higher return per application submitted than men, despite applying to fewer positions. This may occur because female searchers submit higher-quality applications, or because they apply to positions where they believe they have a higher likelihood of being hired. This research investigates the latter hypothesis in a controlled experimental setting that removes any potential discrimination or penalties applicants face in the real world. Specifically, it investigates whether – given constraints on the number of applications one can submit – men and women employ different strategies when applying to jobs. The experiment identifies the relative influence of risk preferences, competition preferences and subjective self-assessments on job application strategies. The results of this experiment may help to optimally target and mitigate early-career sources of the gender earnings gap.
The Promise of Ranked-Choice Voting: Can It Improve Diversity?
Despite the increasing demand for greater diversity among political officeholders, local, state, and federal institutions continue to fall short of achieving proportional representation. This project tests whether the systems used to elect candidates to various offices contributes to unequal gender and racial representation. It investigate individuals’ concerns about “electability” (i.e., the perceived capability of a candidate to win an election), which disproportionately affects female and underrepresented minority candidates. The research will explore whether electability concerns vary under different voting systems, specifically comparing “first-past-the-post” or standard voting systems and “ranked-choice” voting systems. Using real-world election data as well as experimental methods, it will explore how potential differences in electability concerns under these voting systems can influence individuals’ voting behaviour.
Gendered Patterns in the Language that Experts Use in their Endorsements
Expert endorsements serve as a valuable information resource for individuals evaluating new products and services, especially in health care contexts where quality is difficult to observe. Any tendency for male experts to favour other men, or female experts to favour other women, could thus have a negative impact on quality discovery and lead to suboptimal matching between patients and providers. This research evaluates whether there is a gendered pattern in the endorsements that mental health care professionals provide to each other using a network of almost a quarter million U.S.-based talk therapists, it will observe both the presence of an endorsement as well as the language used in the endorsement. This research proposes that gendered patterns in endorsements may help explain some of the chronic underutilization of mental health care.
The Impact of Registered Indian Status: Evidence from Bill C-31
Recognizing the discriminatory nature of this assignment, the federal government enacted Bill C-31 in 1985, which changed Status eligibility requirements to partially remove these discriminatory features. This change resulted in a 20% increase in the Status population within five years. This research examines the effect of Indian Status in Canada, with particular interest in the impact of lost and/or regained Status for Indigenous women. This work will provided the first causal estimates of “Registered Indian Status” on well-being. A such it has substantial implications over the efficacy of various government programs and direct implications on potential reforms to the Indian Act itself.
The Effect of Federal Fair Lending Regulations on Sexual Orientation Discrimination in the Mortgage Market
This study examines whether including sexual orientation as a protected class in federal fair lending regulations mitigates discrimination against same-sex co-borrowers in home mortgages. Relative to mortgages in states with similar protections in state laws, this research predicts and finds that the federal regulatory changes reduce the disparity in mortgage pricing between opposite-sex and same-sex co-borrowers in states without state-level protections. This research documents that this reduction in pricing disparity is only significant for lenders that are more in compliance with existing anti-discrimination laws protecting racial minorities and banks whose headquarters is located in states that do not have similar state laws protecting sexual orientation minorities. Supplemental analyses suggest that these results are not driven by changes in borrower credit risk or lender underwriting standards. Collectively, the evidence supports that anti-discrimination fair lending regulations at the federal level mitigate discrimination against same-sex co-borrowers in the mortgage market. This study contributes to the DEI literature and carries important policy and societal implications.
Revolutionary Care: Technology Use in Precarious Care Work
Care institutions are facing massive care staffing shortages around the world. Simultaneously, the role of technology has been positioned to transform routine tasks through the introduction of automation or other technological interventions. However, the work of care is innately relational – this project will explore how the introduction of such technologies might alter the sense of identity and role responsibility for care workers typically working in low-wage, precarious positions. There are advocacy and policy implications as to how technologies might be used to assist the work of this group of workers in shifting or upskilling tasks. This project will also explore how might the relationship between care workers and care receivers might change, such as through the management of time and service, as well as the quality of care. Through interviews and ethnographic observations, this research will explore how the introduction of new technologies will impact efficiency, voice and working conditions for care workers.
Gender-Based Price Discrimination: An Antitrust Concern?
The term "pink tax" refers to the phenomenon in which goods marketed to women are priced higher than similar goods marketed to men (e.g., pink razors being more expensive than their blue counterparts). If differences in prices persist and cannot be attributed to higher costs associated with female-oriented products production, it suggests that firms are charging women higher markups. This project investigates the pink tax in the personal care industry and whether antitrust policies should consider gender pricing. Firstly, it estimates a mixed logit demand model using individual data from NielsenIQ to address differences in preferences by gender. Using these estimates, the research can recover marginal costs for the proposed goods, which will be used to study differences in markups. Secondly, this project uses the estimation results to simulate mergers between firms in the industry and see whether these practices can harm one gender more than the other, which could be relevant for the construction of antitrust policy.
Where Does Creativity Come From? How the Gendered Nature of Creativity Beliefs Impacts Organizational Recruiting
Gender gaps are especially large in industries and roles related to creativity and innovation (UNESCO, 2021). Prior research has found that “creative genius” is often associated with masculinity (Proudfoot et al., 2015), and people who do not identify with stereotypically masculine traits may be more likely to self-select out of certain roles or positions that highlight the importance of creative genius. This present research examines how alternatively conceiving of creativity as a process of “discovery” (versus creation) impacts organizational recruiting and outcomes such as people’s willingness to respond to a job posting, seek employment with an organization, as well as their anticipated belonging at the organization. It hypothesizes that a discovery framing of creativity may be perceived as more inclusive, because it does not associate creativity with features of the (stereotyped) individual. At a time in which many organizations are closely examining the biases that may disproportionately undermine organizational diversity, this research seeks to better understand how the creative process can become more empowering and democratic.
Quantifying and Understanding Gender Disadvantages in Reactions to Incorrect Teaching
Even in fields considered “feminine,” women are underrepresented at leadership levels relative to entry levels. At first glance, these gender disparities are confusing given that girls academically outperform boys. However, North American concepts of leadership center innovation and self-promotion which may disadvantage girls and women who are disproportionately encouraged to “be good” and obey authority figures. Previous work has established that when 7- to 10-year-olds were provided incorrect teaching about a videogame, girls were less likely than boys to explore their own ideas after teaching failed, and consequently succeeded and learned less despite comparable performance initially. The current project probes the robustness of these findings by investigating the effects of gender typicality and task demands on gender differences in innovation, as well as the developmental trajectory of these differences. By interrogating gender socialization, this work identifies gaps in educational practices that contribute to leadership gaps between girls and boys, and later, women and men.
Female Economic Immigrants Driven Out of Japan Due to Gender Inequality: Exploring their Economic Integration in Canada
Canada’s economic growth is tied to the contributions of immigrants; at the same time, immigrants, and especially immigrant women of colour, tend to experience wage gaps and discrimination in gaining meaningful employment. At the same time, there has been a report that Japanese women, compared to Japanese men, are “driven out” of Japan due to gender inequality, and immigrate to countries such as Canada. How do these Japanese women who immigrated to Canada in the hopes of having more gender equality fare once here? Have they experienced different forms of discrimination in seeking economic integration into Canada? Building on the Principal Investigator’s expertise in immigrant employment, ant-oppressive practice, and Japanese Canadian communities, this bilingual research study (in English and Japanese languages) aims to understand the lived experiences of female Japanese immigrants (FJIs) who immigrated to Canada partly or wholly due to gender inequality in Japan. An interpretive case study will include an analysis of in-depth interviews and online focus groups of FJIs, as well as the review of existing services that FJIs have accessed. The research summary will be shared with the participants and Japanese immigrant communities through key informants, existing listservs, and social media. Further, the findings and recommendations will be disseminated with immigrant service providers, funders, and policy makers to shed light on the actual experiences of Asian female immigrants beyond what is seen by the numbers.
How Marginalized Actors Develop New Market Strategies After Institutional Reform
Market governance reforms are often passed by policymakers to support the economic empowerment of low socioeconomic status business owners in developing countries. However, major policy reforms – even equalizing ones – represent shocks in actors’ environments that create a need for new resources and capabilities. This project aims to examine the obstacles that actors with few pre-existing resources face in the wake of major reforms in their environment and the strategies they use to improve their outcomes. This study conducts an inductive investigation in the cocoa industry in Trinidad and Tobago where a 2014 industry-wide reform obliged cocoa farmers to shift from operating within a state-controlled protectionist market governance system to a free market system. It considers the role of two factors: the allocation choices made by intermediary organizations that act as gatekeepers to critical resources in the new market environment and farmers’ own historically- and structurally-determined capabilities and motivations. By using ethnographic and survey methods to study farmers and other industry stakeholders at the individual-level, this project will examine how cognitive, behavioral and relational factors affect the real chances of success for marginalized actors who have been targeted for support by policymakers.
Regulating Biases: The Impact of Anti-Discriminating Policies on Firms
Equity and diversity are increasingly at the center of public discourse. Many governments around the world have introduced anti-discrimination policies to regulate firms’ labor practices. This project aims to understand the impact of these policies on firms. In particular, it studies a broad policy in the US that prohibits discrimination by federal contractors. Starting in 1965, contractors are banned from discriminating against employees or job applicants based on individual characteristics if their contract amount exceeds a threshold. Another threshold triggers compliance with affirmative actions. This projects uses a regression discontinuity design to estimate the causal effect of these regulations on firms’ labor outcomes and performance. The analysis links Census data on employee characteristics and firm outcomes with detailed contract-level data. It will first test whether compliance with these policies indeed leads to a more diverse workforce as well as more equitable labor practices. It then examines the impact of these policies on firms’ productivity and financial performance. Importantly, this research compares the effect of anti-discrimination with the effect of affirmative action. The project will inform policy design when regulating biases in labor markets. It will also help managers understand the implications of these polices on their firms.
Gender Inequality and Household Purchase Decisions: The Case of Automobiles in China
In household purchase decisions, gender inequality can have a significant impact on the final outcome, particularly for purchases such as homes or cars. This research project aims to investigate how gender inequality affects product choices in the Chinese auto market, the largest auto market in the world. Gender inequality in car ownership is a widespread issue that impacts consumer behavior across regions and age groups, and is closely linked to gender inequality measured by education gap. Understanding the preferences of diverse consumer segments is crucial, as products preferred by men and women show significant differences in market share. Additionally, by examining the impact of the one-child policy, a nationwide birth control policy in China, this research will show how this unique change in upbringing can impact car ownership and purchase decisions. In light of the increasing education and income of women, this research makes significant implications for automakers to develop more targeted and gender- sensitive marketing strategies as well as tailor their product design and advertising to better resonate with diverse consumer groups. Moreover, policymakers can leverage these findings to promote initiatives that foster women's financial independence, decision-making power, and overall well-being.2022-2023 Grant Recipients
Gender Differences in Accusations and Believability
Accusations of workplace retaliation, harassment, discrimination, and whistleblowing etc. are currently commonplace in organizations. However, believability and credibility of these accusations are influenced by factors like race, prototypicality of victims, delay in making accusations but more robustly, gender. While it is interesting to note who perceivers deem as more credible, men or women, it is imperative to understand why that may be the case. Given past research on gender gap in self-promotion and self-belief, we propose a series of research studies to understand when men and women choose to accuse and the role of increasing support and evidence as interventions in making this decision. Specifically, we suggest that fear of dismissal and backlash, and less confidence will prevent women from making accusations unless they have a considerable amount of evidence to increase their confidence in being perceived as believable and credible. Higher amount of evidence may serve as an important intervention for women’s likelihood to report. This has important repercussions for the workplace in understanding the potential of missed reporting of minor transgressions by women, why women may be reporting more serious crimes than men, as well as why claims made by women may be considered more credible (as they usually accompany greater evidence).
Promoting Economic Inclusion among Racialized Migrant Women
This research is inspired by the transformative resilience of racialized migrant women (RMW) in Toronto who resist social and economic exclusion through organizing mutual aid, direct services, and advocacy campaigns that promote social change. Racialized migrant women (RMW) represent a growing proportion in Canada facing intersecting barriers related to systemic racism, gender inequality, and poverty. As a result, RMW are more likely to experience social isolation, thereby increasing vulnerability to gender-based violence. The purpose of this research is to document the holistic place-based model of the South Asian Women’s Rights Organization (SAWRO), a community-based organization serving individuals in Toronto’s East Danforth neighborhoods. Using participatory action method, the project will employ in-depth interviews and surveys with community women along with focus group discussions at a community forum to understand their lived experiences and how they perceive SAWRO’s impact to provide a template for other organizations to replicate this service delivery approach.
The Role of Gender in Knowledge Contribution and Patenting
Innovation is considered the main driver of economic growth and the biggest contributor to societal progress. As such, scientists have long studied the conditions under which innovation - and creative ideas more generally - emerge. A growing body of evidence suggests that minority group members or diverse teams have the potential to produce the most innovative ideas. However, diversity, or lack thereof, is currently a problem in settings where ideas matter. With this work, I explore gender differences in a particular setting of idea production: academic publications. That is, I analyze the role of gender in a scientist’s decision to contribute their knowledge and decision what topic they want to contribute their knowledge to. This analysis will be extended to patenting activities which will allow us to uncover whether a scientist's knowledge contributions are predictive of their patenting activities. Furthermore, this study attempts to understand how normative and structural constraints or gendered knowledge as a mechanism may inform these decisions.
Gender Discrimination in Remote and On-Site Work: A Survey of Managers’ Perceptions
The COVID-19 pandemic prompted an initial, dramatic shift to remote work, and many employers are now calling employees back on-site. With these changes, researchers and managers have speculated about the relationship between work location and everyday gender discrimination. Some propose that gender discrimination is more common when women work remotely, whereas others argue that it is more common on-site. We conducted two surveys to test these expectations and a third survey to examine managers’ perceptions. Data from a proportionally representative sample of adults in the U.S. establishes a strong association between time spent working on-site and the likelihood of experiencing gender discrimination. Results from a theoretical sample of professional women who work partially remotely and partially on-site further bolster this trend, showing that everyday gender discrimination is significantly more common in on-site settings. Yet in our managerial survey, we find that one-third of managers do not anticipate this relationship, with older managers and those who do not manage remote workers being particularly likely to hold inaccurate views. Failing to anticipate where everyday gender discrimination is more common, managers may not take adequate precautions to counteract the higher incidence of discrimination in on-site work.
Strengthening the investment case for action on gender-based violence and child maltreatment in Canada
Despite protection measures to preserve the rights of women and vulnerable populations, Canada continues to bear a high burden of gender-based violence (GBV) and maltreatment of young people (MYP). This project aims to estimate the economic burden of inaction on GBV and MYP in Canada. Viewed through the lens of Sen’s Capabilities Approach, GBV & MYP threaten human rights and freedoms by compromising individuals’ agency, opportunities, resources, capabilities, and functioning. Using economic and public health modelling approaches, this project captures and estimates the costs associated with the reverberating, cumulative, and multiplicative implications of GBV and MYP for individuals, over their life course and across generations. This estimate, of the large stream of present and future costs, will generate a powerful investment case for curtailing the pandemic of violence, now, into the future and for the next generations. This project is aligned with and will inform The Lancet Commission on GBV and MYP, which has been actively working to generate evidence and mobilize transformative action to achieve a vision of expanding the capabilities and freedoms of women and young people in a world where GBV is eradicated.2021-2022 Grant Recipients
Naming and Framing of Minority Group Labels
Racial group labels such as BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour), underrepresented minorities, and visible minorities are widely used in companies, government, policy, and popular media. Despite their widespread use, there is a lack of consensus around which labels are most inclusive and “correct”, and being exposed to and referred to using non-preferred labels can add to the feeling of stigma and belonging threat that minorities already experience. The desire to “get it right” for individuals must also be balanced with the need that organizations have for terms that they can use to measure, track, and report on racial and other group representation in the aggregate. This GATE-funded project will survey large, nationally-representative samples in the United States and Canada to investigate perceptions and attitudes related to the use of racial group labels in formal and informal contexts, with a particular emphasis on how these perceptions and attitudes are shaped by intersectional group identification across gender, racial, age, and other category lines.
Using Behavioural Tools to Increase Health Seeking Behaviour Among Men
In sub-Saharan Africa, women are more likely than men to be infected with HIV, yet men are significantly more likely to die of AIDS, often because they do not seek medical care. We conducted a randomized experiment in Malawi to test two behavioural tools designed to increase HIV testing among high risk men: scheduled appointments and financial commitment devices. We recruited men at nightclubs and bars, where transactional sex is commonly arranged. We find that both scheduled appointments and financial commitment devices increase HIV testing among this population, but appointments are much more effective. Offering only an appointment more than doubles the HIV testing rate. Appointments are a highly effective and low cost intervention to increase demand for HIV testing among an important and often overlooked demographic.
Read about their research in VoxDev.
The cost to global economies of sustained inaction on gender-based violence.
Violence against women and young people persists as a pandemic, present in every country of the world and affecting nearly 5 billion people globally. Few health conditions or risk factors affect this high proportion of the global population. The Lancet Commission on Gender Based Violence (GBV) and Maltreatment of Young People (MYP) was launched in 2020. It has an explicit focus on expanding the capabilities and freedoms of women and young people with work that will span the continuum of care from prevention to survivorship, the lifecycle from childhood to adulthood, and across families and communities to mitigate the risks of exposure to violence. It aims to enable global, national, and local policy makers and advocates to catalyze and scale-up effective intersectoral policies across economic, health, education, justice and social sectors and to engage the private sector and civil society. One objective of the Commission’s workplan is to produce dynamic, inter-generational estimates of the cost of inaction in addressing GBV and MYP. This project will support the development of the framework for the cost of inaction model. This framework will ground the Commission’s analytical work and will inform the development of an investment case for action. The output from this work will provide a future resource for researchers, policy makers, the private sector and civil society to understand and value the lost opportunities due to GBV beyond the life of the Commission.
Gender, Beliefs, and Performance in Entrepreneurship
This research project consists of two objectives. The first objective is to investigate the underlying reasons for the gender funding gap in the venture capital industry. Using a simple model with Bayesian beliefs updating to develop empirical predictions and comprehensive administrative data from France, it shows that miscalibrated beliefs about gender – also called stereotypes -- impedes start-ups' growth and development. This study helps to rationalize policy interventions that aim to increase the participation of minorities in environments in which they are underrepresented, i.e., more female entrepreneurs in male-dominated sectors and more male entrepreneurs in female-dominated sectors. The second objective of the project is to study entrepreneurs' expectations about developing their new ventures. I propose to explore the gender differences in how early-stage entrepreneurs form beliefs about the future and incorporate newly available information to revise their beliefs. In this project, I combine a representative survey of French entrepreneurs with administrative data containing firms' performance measures and employment composition.
Grant made available through a SSHRC partnership grant with the Women’s Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub.
Certifications for Rectifications? How evaluation systems affect inequality on digital platform
Recent years have seen a proliferation of digital platforms on which individual sellers and buyers interact to exchange products and services. Although the rise of these platforms has provided new opportunities for many people, the opportunities provided by digital platforms are unevenly distributed by gender and race. This study seeks to understand whether evaluation systems—certifications or reviews—can help mitigate gender and racial inequality on digital platforms. I propose that certain evaluation systems can exacerbate (rather than mitigate) gender and racial inequality on digital platforms by accruing greater benefit to white men than to women and racial minorities, because people often discount evaluations that provide positive assessments of women and racial minorities. This study has important implications for how platform-based companies can design better evaluation systems to address gender and racial inequality on digital platforms.
Trade in appliances, household production, and labor force participation
Globalization has increased rapidly during the past decades. A large economics literature has carefully measured how the resulting increased competition from countries with abundant labor has transformed labor markets in rich and poor countries alike. This literature has uncovered consequences for a large set of outcomes ranging from income inequality to health, and even death. An organizing principle in most of this literature is that trade competition affects labor demand. We offer a complementary view, in which trade instead affects the supply of labor. In our paper, increased trade reduces the price of appliances that substitute for labor in household production, such as refrigerators, laundry machines, and microwaves. Cheaper appliances allow workers to reallocate time away from home production and into market activities. As a result, labor force participation increases|particularly for females. We measure this mechanism's strength using data from Peru. Between 1983-2017, female labor force participation in Peru increased by more than 30 percentage points, while that of males increased only by 11 percentage points. At the same time, the import prices of appliances–which are not produced domestically–declined by 50%, driving a surge in these goods' imports.
Gender norms and financial decision making
Countries with more traditional attitudes to gender roles have lower stock market participation rates, reducing lifelong wealth creation and leaving households poorer in retirement. One explanation is that these attitudes towards gender have resulted in women being excluded from household decision making (Ke, 2020). In this project we use individual-level asset holdings to explore the financial decisions of male and female immigrants in Sweden. We address three questions: (1) are women from countries with more traditional gender roles less likely to invest in the stock market than women from more gender-equal societies? (2) does the gap in stock-market participation rates between men and women increase in proportion to how traditional their attitudes are towards gender? and (3) does assimilation within a more gender-equal society moderate this cultural norm and increase the stock market participation rates of all household members?
2020-2021 Grant Recipients
Gendered Financial Inclusion: A Mixed-Method Study of Financial Education in Colombia
Female entrepreneurs often have less access to financial tools and capital than their male counterparts. These gendered disparities are pronounced among low-income entrepreneurs in developing countries. Researchers suggest that part of this “financial inclusion gap” stems from women’s reduced knowledge about financial products. Yet interventions to promote financial education have produced mixed results, with many efforts having no effect on reducing the gap. In this study, we propose that gendered interaction patterns in educational settings may influence how women and men engage with and apply financial knowledge. Through a partnership with the Colombian government, we will investigate whether interaction patterns among participants and facilitators in a large-scale financial education program affect financial access and activity. We will collect field experimental and qualitative data to examine whether female entrepreneurs learn more or engage more effectively with financial tools when they receive financial education via different interaction channels.
Gender Stereotypes and Entrepreneur Financing
In this project, gender differences will be examined in external equity financing using administrative data on the population of start-ups in France. Female-founded start-ups are 27% less likely to raise external equity including venture capital. However, the gender funding gap reverses in female-dominated sectors, where female entrepreneurs are more likely to raise funding than male entrepreneurs. These observed gender funding gaps are not driven by the composition of founding teams or by differences across individuals regarding education, experience, ex-ante motivations or optimism. Moreover, this project shows that it is conditional on being backed with equity, entrepreneurs outperform in gender-incongruent sectors, suggesting that requirements for funding are higher for entrepreneurs that are minority in gender-incongruent sectors. The evidence is consistent with the existence of context-dependent stereotypes among investors. These findings suggest that equity investors could generate higher returns by investing in minority investors in gender-incongruent sectors - female entrepreneurs in male-dominated sectors and male entrepreneurs in female-dominated sectors.
STEM Aspirations and Pathways for Girls in Japan
Countries around the world have struggled to implement education policies to encourage more female students to pursue Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). This has resulted in a persistent and sizeable gender gap in academic subjects such as secondary-level mathematics in countries like Japan. This study evaluates the influences of a design thinking workshop with an aim to increase students’ self-efficacy and motivation to pursue STEM. This study seeks to understand how this innovative educational intervention altered the Japanese middle and high school female students’ aspirations and goals related to STEM.
Read Rie's paper in International Journal of STEM Education.
Read GATE's brief on Rie's research.
Learn more in this article on Biomed Central.
An Exploration of the Factors Affecting Gender Earnings Gaps in the Absence of Wage Discrimination
Countless studies document a gender earnings gap in labour markets and organizations, but few studies are able to tease apart the factors that lead to the gap. The project explores these factors among a group of emergency department physicians – an interesting setting because many factors proposed to lead to earnings gaps are held constant, such as education, occupation, and the hourly wage rate. While some shifts do receive a premium (e.g., night shifts, on-call), because shifts are equitably assigned, the only factor that could contribute to a gender earnings gap in shift-based compensation is gendered sorting across shifts. Using detailed compensation data, the investigators explore whether shift premiums and shift trading lead to a gender earnings gap in this setting. Findings will be instructive for understanding if the design of compensation systems affects gender earnings gaps in the absence of wage discrimination.
Afghan Rescue: A Study of Emergent Volunteering in a Crisis
This project stems from a larger study examining how people organize to provide urgent assistance in a time of crisis, using the case of a massive volunteer effort to help people trying to leave Afghanistan in 2021 as the Taliban seized control. One aspect of that study will be to explore gender differences in the motivation, participation, and coordination practices of volunteers, by targeting 50% of interviewees who identify as women, including female military veterans and female volunteers from the non-profit sector.
The Intersectional Effects of Gender and Race on Professor Pay
Institutional efforts toward pay equity have thus far only focused on how to address gender inequities in pay. This project examines how the intersection of race and gender can also result in pay gaps. An inter-disciplinary research team of faculty from management and computational biology will examine this question by adding performance metrics relevant to the academic context to our model of pay. They will examine how professors’ research productivity and students’ evaluations of their teaching affect their pay while controlling for seniority. This project will extend previous research examining the role of teaching and research performance metrics in predicting pay (Lee & Won, 2014) and the role of gender and race in predicting teaching evaluations (Fan et al, 2019), to test a comprehensive model of how race, gender, seniority, teaching evaluations and research productivity predict pay.
The Cases for Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives
Historically, managers have justified diversity and inclusion initiatives by noting that they tend to have a beneficial impact on the firm’s bottom line. This “business case” for diversity in organizations aligns with Institute for Gender and the Economy Annual Report 2019-2020 7 dominant shareholder maximization narratives, but recent research has suggested that this profit-driven focus may distract from considering a broader set of impacts. This project will investigate whether the “cases” that CEOs make for diversity and inclusion initiatives impact the degree to which their managers support these initiatives. Using a survey experiment to examine the impact of “business”, “moral”, “legal”, and other cases, the researchers hope to provide nuanced evidence that informs organizations looking to encourage and sustain diverse and inclusive working environments for the long haul.
2019-2020 Grant Recipients
Strength in numbers: How gender group composition influences knowledge contribution
Cultural beliefs about gender affect how individuals behave within organizations, and more specifically how they contribute knowledge and ideas to their team. Organizations in male-typed industries have been actively engaging in initiatives to mitigate the pervasive influence of gender beliefs, yet with mixed success. Using a behavioral approach, the project’s purpose is to consider how gender group composition may help reduce gender beliefs’ impact on the willingness to contribute ideas and thus improve knowledge accumulation in teams.
Effects of Media Outlet on Gender and Social Biases in Artificial Intelligence
We will train machine-learning models on diverse corpora to address four open empirical questions: (1) Do politically left- vs. right-leaning media lead to different kinds of social biases such as sexism, racism, and ageism? (2) Do politically more extreme (either left or right) vs. more moderate media lead to different degrees of social biases? (3) How robust are these biases across algorithm sophistication—or how minimal can the algorithms be while still exhibiting the biases? (4) Do these biases predict judgments and decisions in political and business contexts?
Read their paper in Cognitive Science.
Gender Differences in Response to Competition in the Workplace: Evidence from a Natural Experiment
Throughout the world, in business as well as in government, men are strongly overrepresented in top positions. One explanation is that men are more strongly motivated by competitive incentives. By now, there is some empirical support for such gender differences, often found in the lab. This project exploits a large-scale competitive tournament to examine gender differences in response to competition and the drivers of such in a real workplace. In particular, we focus on a typical service sector in China with both male and female workers and study how such competitive environment influences productivity as well as the decision to quit the job during and after the tournament for workers of both genders.
Does Marriage Matter?: Understanding the Impact of Same-Sex Marriage on the Gender Pay Gap
Research has shown that married men earn nearly 11 percent more per hour than men who are unmarried, even after controlling for experience, age, and education. This “marriage premium” does not appear for women. While this work has sparked immense interest, it focuses on understanding cisgender men and women in heterosexual partnerships. Do lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgender and queer people in same-sex marriages experience these differences in wages, productivity and expanded economic social networks compared to either their unmarried or heterosexual counterparts? Using data collected from the 2016 and 2020 Collaborative Multi-Racial Post-Election Survey (CMPS), which oversamples people of color, we will apply an intersectional lens to uncover exactly how any marriage premium operates for LGBTQ people. Our findings will contribute to understanding the roots of a very old problem in the context of newly expanded LGBTQ rights.
She Said “Me, Too,” He Said “Not Me:” Situational Ambiguity and Sexual Harassment
Following the #MeToo movement, sexual harassment cases have been salient in the public eye. This has led to increased attention to mandatory and uniform HR training programs that may reduce harassment behaviors and clinical approaches that examine the characteristics of repeat perpetrators (“serial predator” models). However, given the wide spread nature of the phenomena, the problem likely extends beyond serial harassers. Here, we build upon a perspective that explains how even “good people” can routinely cross ethical boundaries: the situationist approach. Specifically, we propose that situations that create ambiguity around individuals’ actions will increase the likelihood of sexual harassment.
Developing Helpful Habits: Designing Dynamic Interventions to Promote Financial Inclusion Among Women and People of Colour in Financial Savings Domains
Previous work has increased people’s knowledge of how to establish better savings habits and have developed various interventions to induce a change in behavior. However, these interventions typically only induce short-term behavior change, typically at a single decision point in time (e.g., choosing not to spend money on an indulgence, choosing to put money into a savings account). Moreover, many of these programs and interventions have ignored the unique struggles faced by women and other vulnerable and marginalized groups. Our research seeks to address this fundamental gap in the literature: Which types of interventions are effective at improving behavior over the long-term for a broader range of individuals (e.g., women, people of colour, LGBTQ communities, and those who have intersectional identities)? We have assembled an interdisciplinary team, combining researchers from consumer behavior, computer science, econometrics, and social neuroscience in order to design a more inclusive set of interventions that can foster motivation not only for the short-term but in ways that can have sustained success in the long-term as well.
A Closer Look or a Cursory Glance? Systematic Search Bias in Statistical Discrimination
In modern labor markets, employers, have access to many sources of fine-grained information about job seekers. But hiring managers still often rely on gender and racial stereotypes when making employment decisions. To address this puzzle, this research tests the hypothesis that hiring managers tend to devote more time and effort to finding individuating information about in-group applicants than out-group applicants; for example, white male hiring managers spend more time searching for additional information about white male job seekers than about female and non-white candidates. The results of this research will have potential implications for understanding and eliminating the causes of labor market discrimination.
Read András' paper in American Sociological Review.
Read GATE's research brief on András' research.
2018-2019 Grant Recipients
Salary disclosure laws and the gender wage gap
The gender wage gap in Canada has narrowed over time, but it remains significant. One hypothesis is that the pay gap persists because it is hidden. Building on this hypothesis, policy makers in many countries, including Canada, the US, the UK, and Norway, have proposed various pay disclosure requirements. The objective of this project is to test this hypothesis using worker-level data from Statistic Canada spanning over 40 years. We plan to exploit provincial variation in pay disclosure laws, and the timing of their implementation, to estimate the impact of such salary disclosure laws on the gender wage gap.Read their paper in American Economic Journal.
Learn more about this research in Harvard Business Review.
Choice architecture and women’s leadership ascension
In most organizations, promotion into leadership typically requires self-nomination via an application. However, past research clearly suggests that this process could put women at a disadvantage. Approaching this problem from a behavioral science perspective, we propose to apply well-established findings on "choice architecture" to the choice of applying for leadership positions. We hypothesize that using the "opt-out" choice framework will take the onus off of women (or people of any gender) to "lean in" to apply and compete.Read their paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Read GATE's research brief of their paper.
Learn more about Joyce, Sonia, and Nico's research in VoxEU.
Naming Brand Names: Is there a gender strategy?
When naming humans, clear gender conventions exist. In turn, people associate particular genders with particular characteristics. Do these stereotypes also apply to brand names? For example, is Nike (which is analogous to Mike) a "masculine brand"? If so, is that a desirable association to have? The broader question is whether-or-not firms have a gender strategy when naming brands. If so, what are they trying to accomplish when they make these choices? With this research, we seek to answer these questions.
Read their latest working paper.
Gender differences in labour income dynamics as drivers of financial decision making
Labour income risk has been increasingly recognized as an important factor that affects individuals' decision-making processes. Given the structural differences in labour market access between men and women, and their constraints, we want to investigate whether such differences lead women and men to make different portfolio allocation choices; shifting their investments between "risky" and "non-risky" assets during periods of earnings shocks.
An analysis of the organizational and economic consequences of gender equity policies
Sexual harassment is likely correlated to firm culture and other gender issues, such as gender pay inequities and LGBQT+ friendliness. This culture may finally be changing given the recent emergence of high profile harassment cases that led to the #MeToo movement; Which may act as an important catalyst of change throughout business and society. Thus, we aim to examine and document how the #MeToo movement changes the extent to which firms' gender policies are correlated with creativity, profitability, market valuation, sustainability, etc.
Read their paper in Journal of Business Ethics.
Think-Leader-Think-Women: People turn to women leaders for teams with hidden goals
For this research, we propose that women are more likely than men to emerge as leaders, i.e., when teams must uncover hidden goals. Such goals require optimizing the team's capability given environmental constraints, and are thus goals we think that women will be more effective at identifying. Supporting this contention, the goal pursuit literature indicates that women are more likely to optimize goals by controlling and accommodating the environment, whereas men tend to rely on solely controlling the environment. Thus, we propose that women more than men will identify hidden goals, align the team behind such goals, and thus emerge as leaders among their team's members.
The Labor Market Impacts of Import Competition on Female Workers: Evidence from Peru
Trade liberalization affects labor market outcomes for male and female workers. In this study, we examine the gender-specific effects of exposure to import competition in Peru after China's accession to the WTO. By considering employment substitution within and across industries and in local labor markets, we aim to quantify the impact of import competition on labor market outcomes of females, as well as the main underlying channels. The outcomes of the study would inform policy makers about potential policies to mitigate the effects of globalization on the economic and social status of women - particularly in developing and low-income countries.
Read their paper in Labour Economics.
Read GATE's research brief on their paper.
Compounding Losses: Labour struggles of immigrant women in STEM
Among university graduates in Canada aged 25 to 34, immigrant women are twice as likely to have a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) degree as Canadian-born women (23% versus 13%). Yet, immigrant women face some of the highest levels of labour market challenges in Canada across indicators, including: unemployment rate, wage gap, part-time employment, and low-income rate. We seek to document the complex gendered "work-finding" hurdles for immigrant women in STEM fields in order to begin examining the Loss on Investment (LOI) being absorbed by the Canadian economy due to this untapped talent.
View a short film based on their research here.
2017-2018 Grant Recipients
Impact on the gender pay gap of CEO exposure to gender imbalance during formative years
This project will explore the impact of formative years of CEOs on the gender gap in corporate offices that they manage. Specifically, it will assess the role of demographic characteristics of the area where the CEO grew up, his or her education and family background on the gender pay gap among corporate officers, capital allocation to and promotions of male and female managers, and other aspects of differential treatment of men and women.Read Mikhail's publication in The Review of Financial Studies.
Watch Mikhail discuss his research at the Rotman Magazine event, "Art of Change."
Scaling Up Gender Equality (how different ratings scales shape outcomes by gender)
Winner, American Sociological Association Granovetter Award for best article in economic sociology.
This project explores how different rating scales (e.g., 1 to 5 versus 1 to 10) magnify or attenuate differences in scores given to men and women in evaluations. By revealing which types of scales can reduce gender bias, our research has the potential to illuminate concrete interventions to reduce bias and advance women’s careers.Read András' paper in American Sociological Review.
Learn more about András' research in this article for Harvard Business Review.
Read GATE's research brief on András' paper.
Race, Gender and Agency in Leadership: An Examination of Intersectional Identities and Agentic Penalties
This research project will examine the effect of different agentic, leadership behaviors on evaluations of Black and White women leaders. I predict that unlike their White counterparts, Black women will be protected from agentic penalties where the described behavior aligns with stereotypes associated with their race and gender.
Adding More Women to Corporate Boards: The Impact on Boards’ Advisory Effectiveness
We ask whether adding more women directors to corporate boards affects the boards’ advisory effectiveness, by measuring women directors’ incremental expertise contribution. By providing empirical evidence on the current, world-wide debate on female director quotas, this study could yield crucial policy implications.Read Daehyun's paper in American Economic Review.
Read an interview about this research in Forbes India.
Playing the Inside Game versus the Outside Offer Game: How Men and Women Respond to Workplace Successes and Failures May Drive the Gender Pay Gap
It is well known that there is a gender pay gap; women receive less pay than men for doing the same work in the same positions. We propose that this discrepancy may be partially driven by differences in the way women and men respond to successes and failures in the workplace. More specifically, we propose that women may respond to losing out on a promotion by increasing their commitment inside the workplace (i.e., increasing organizational citizenship behaviours) while men, in contrast, may be more likely to increase their utility to the organization by searching for a higher paying outside offer (subsequently leading the employer to match the offer, creating this pay gap).
Shifting Stereotypes to Improve Leadership Aspiration and Self‐Efficacy among Female Leaders
In this project, we aim to develop a novel and impactful intervention for reducing barriers to leadership among women in a way that minimizes backlash and negative spillover effects. By changing the framing of the leadership role to include more traditionally feminine attributes, we hope to increase the perceived compatibility between the female gender role and the leader role and to increase leadership aspiration and leadership self‐efficacy among women.Read their paper in Academy of Management.
Learn more about this research in UCLA Anderson Review.
Barriers to Reporting Sexual Harassment and Assault
Sexual harassment and assault are under reported in academic and professional environments, and organizations often lack evidence-based reporting policy. We use a randomized experiment, among university students, to test innovative reporting tools that make reporting easier and increase credibility by matching students who report the same offender; these tools are designed to encourage reporting and deter perpetrators.
Gender and Awards in Financial Industries
For many professions, especially in finance, career progression and promotion relies heavily on awards and public recognition. Our project examines the role of gender in receiving awards, particularly the impact of pioneering women who receive awards as well as the impact of gender/role typical behavior.To support rigorous research, GATE offers annual research grants to qualified applicants.
Since its launch in 2016, GATE has funded 61 researchers investigating topics such as the impact of CEO characteristics on the corporate gender gap, barriers to reporting sexual harassment and assault, increasing the number of girls and women pursuing STEM careers, and the double-bind that women face in entering the job market and advancing in their careers.
2021-2022 Grant Recipients
Naming and Framing of Minority Group Labels
Racial group labels such as BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour), underrepresented minorities, and visible minorities are widely used in companies, government, policy, and popular media. Despite their widespread use, there is a lack of consensus around which labels are most inclusive and “correct”, and being exposed to and referred to using non-preferred labels can add to the feeling of stigma and belonging threat that minorities already experience. The desire to “get it right” for individuals must also be balanced with the need that organizations have for terms that they can use to measure, track, and report on racial and other group representation in the aggregate. This GATE-funded project will survey large, nationally-representative samples in the United States and Canada to investigate perceptions and attitudes related to the use of racial group labels in formal and informal contexts, with a particular emphasis on how these perceptions and attitudes are shaped by intersectional group identification across gender, racial, age, and other category lines.
Using Behavioural Tools to Increase Health Seeking Behaviour Among Men
In sub-Saharan Africa, women are more likely than men to be infected with HIV, yet men are significantly more likely to die of AIDS, often because they do not seek medical care. We conducted a randomized experiment in Malawi to test two behavioural tools designed to increase HIV testing among high risk men: scheduled appointments and financial commitment devices. We recruited men at nightclubs and bars, where transactional sex is commonly arranged. We find that both scheduled appointments and financial commitment devices increase HIV testing among this population, but appointments are much more effective. Offering only an appointment more than doubles the HIV testing rate. Appointments are a highly effective and low cost intervention to increase demand for HIV testing among an important and often overlooked demographic.
Read about their research in VoxDev.
The cost to global economies of sustained inaction on gender-based violence.
Violence against women and young people persists as a pandemic, present in every country of the world and affecting nearly 5 billion people globally. Few health conditions or risk factors affect this high proportion of the global population. The Lancet Commission on Gender Based Violence (GBV) and Maltreatment of Young People (MYP) was launched in 2020. It has an explicit focus on expanding the capabilities and freedoms of women and young people with work that will span the continuum of care from prevention to survivorship, the lifecycle from childhood to adulthood, and across families and communities to mitigate the risks of exposure to violence. It aims to enable global, national, and local policy makers and advocates to catalyze and scale-up effective intersectoral policies across economic, health, education, justice and social sectors and to engage the private sector and civil society. One objective of the Commission’s workplan is to produce dynamic, inter-generational estimates of the cost of inaction in addressing GBV and MYP. This project will support the development of the framework for the cost of inaction model. This framework will ground the Commission’s analytical work and will inform the development of an investment case for action. The output from this work will provide a future resource for researchers, policy makers, the private sector and civil society to understand and value the lost opportunities due to GBV beyond the life of the Commission.
Gender, Beliefs, and Performance in Entrepreneurship
This research project consists of two objectives. The first objective is to investigate the underlying reasons for the gender funding gap in the venture capital industry. Using a simple model with Bayesian beliefs updating to develop empirical predictions and comprehensive administrative data from France, it shows that miscalibrated beliefs about gender – also called stereotypes -- impedes start-ups' growth and development. This study helps to rationalize policy interventions that aim to increase the participation of minorities in environments in which they are underrepresented, i.e., more female entrepreneurs in male-dominated sectors and more male entrepreneurs in female-dominated sectors. The second objective of the project is to study entrepreneurs' expectations about developing their new ventures. I propose to explore the gender differences in how early-stage entrepreneurs form beliefs about the future and incorporate newly available information to revise their beliefs. In this project, I combine a representative survey of French entrepreneurs with administrative data containing firms' performance measures and employment composition.
Grant made available through a SSHRC partnership grant with the Women’s Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub.
Certifications for Rectifications? How evaluation systems affect inequality on digital platform
Recent years have seen a proliferation of digital platforms on which individual sellers and buyers interact to exchange products and services. Although the rise of these platforms has provided new opportunities for many people, the opportunities provided by digital platforms are unevenly distributed by gender and race. This study seeks to understand whether evaluation systems—certifications or reviews—can help mitigate gender and racial inequality on digital platforms. I propose that certain evaluation systems can exacerbate (rather than mitigate) gender and racial inequality on digital platforms by accruing greater benefit to white men than to women and racial minorities, because people often discount evaluations that provide positive assessments of women and racial minorities. This study has important implications for how platform-based companies can design better evaluation systems to address gender and racial inequality on digital platforms.
Trade in appliances, household production, and labor force participation
Globalization has increased rapidly during the past decades. A large economics literature has carefully measured how the resulting increased competition from countries with abundant labor has transformed labor markets in rich and poor countries alike. This literature has uncovered consequences for a large set of outcomes ranging from income inequality to health, and even death. An organizing principle in most of this literature is that trade competition affects labor demand. We offer a complementary view, in which trade instead affects the supply of labor. In our paper, increased trade reduces the price of appliances that substitute for labor in household production, such as refrigerators, laundry machines, and microwaves. Cheaper appliances allow workers to reallocate time away from home production and into market activities. As a result, labor force participation increases|particularly for females. We measure this mechanism's strength using data from Peru. Between 1983-2017, female labor force participation in Peru increased by more than 30 percentage points, while that of males increased only by 11 percentage points. At the same time, the import prices of appliances–which are not produced domestically–declined by 50%, driving a surge in these goods' imports.
Gender norms and financial decision making
Countries with more traditional attitudes to gender roles have lower stock market participation rates, reducing lifelong wealth creation and leaving households poorer in retirement. One explanation is that these attitudes towards gender have resulted in women being excluded from household decision making (Ke, 2020). In this project we use individual-level asset holdings to explore the financial decisions of male and female immigrants in Sweden. We address three questions: (1) are women from countries with more traditional gender roles less likely to invest in the stock market than women from more gender-equal societies? (2) does the gap in stock-market participation rates between men and women increase in proportion to how traditional their attitudes are towards gender? and (3) does assimilation within a more gender-equal society moderate this cultural norm and increase the stock market participation rates of all household members?
2020-2021 Grant Recipients
The Cases for Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives
Historically, managers have justified diversity and inclusion initiatives by noting that they tend to have a beneficial impact on the firm’s bottom line. This “business case” for diversity in organizations aligns with Institute for Gender and the Economy Annual Report 2019-2020 7 dominant shareholder maximization narratives, but recent research has suggested that this profit-driven focus may distract from considering a broader set of impacts. This project will investigate whether the “cases” that CEOs make for diversity and inclusion initiatives impact the degree to which their managers support these initiatives. Using a survey experiment to examine the impact of “business”, “moral”, “legal”, and other cases, the researchers hope to provide nuanced evidence that informs organizations looking to encourage and sustain diverse and inclusive working environments for the long haul.
The Intersectional Effects of Gender and Race on Professor Pay
Institutional efforts toward pay equity have thus far only focused on how to address gender inequities in pay. This project examines how the intersection of race and gender can also result in pay gaps. An inter-disciplinary research team of faculty from management and computational biology will examine this question by adding performance metrics relevant to the academic context to our model of pay. They will examine how professors’ research productivity and students’ evaluations of their teaching affect their pay while controlling for seniority. This project will extend previous research examining the role of teaching and research performance metrics in predicting pay (Lee & Won, 2014) and the role of gender and race in predicting teaching evaluations (Fan et al, 2019), to test a comprehensive model of how race, gender, seniority, teaching evaluations and research productivity predict pay.
Afghan Rescue: A Study of Emergent Volunteering in a Crisis
This project stems from a larger study examining how people organize to provide urgent assistance in a time of crisis, using the case of a massive volunteer effort to help people trying to leave Afghanistan in 2021 as the Taliban seized control. One aspect of that study will be to explore gender differences in the motivation, participation, and coordination practices of volunteers, by targeting 50% of interviewees who identify as women, including female military veterans and female volunteers from the non-profit sector.
An Exploration of the Factors Affecting Gender Earnings Gaps in the Absence of Wage Discrimination
Countless studies document a gender earnings gap in labour markets and organizations, but few studies are able to tease apart the factors that lead to the gap. The project explores these factors among a group of emergency department physicians – an interesting setting because many factors proposed to lead to earnings gaps are held constant, such as education, occupation, and the hourly wage rate. While some shifts do receive a premium (e.g., night shifts, on-call), because shifts are equitably assigned, the only factor that could contribute to a gender earnings gap in shift-based compensation is gendered sorting across shifts. Using detailed compensation data, the investigators explore whether shift premiums and shift trading lead to a gender earnings gap in this setting. Findings will be instructive for understanding if the design of compensation systems affects gender earnings gaps in the absence of wage discrimination.
STEM Aspirations and Pathways for Girls in Japan
Countries around the world have struggled to implement education policies to encourage more female students to pursue Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). This has resulted in a persistent and sizeable gender gap in academic subjects such as secondary-level mathematics in countries like Japan. This study evaluates the influences of a design thinking workshop with an aim to increase students’ self-efficacy and motivation to pursue STEM. This study seeks to understand how this innovative educational intervention altered the Japanese middle and high school female students’ aspirations and goals related to STEM.
Read Rie's paper in International Journal of STEM Education.
Read GATE's brief on Rie's research.
Learn more in this article on Biomed Central.
Gendered Financial Inclusion: A Mixed-Method Study of Financial Education in Colombia
Female entrepreneurs often have less access to financial tools and capital than their male counterparts. These gendered disparities are pronounced among low-income entrepreneurs in developing countries. Researchers suggest that part of this “financial inclusion gap” stems from women’s reduced knowledge about financial products. Yet interventions to promote financial education have produced mixed results, with many efforts having no effect on reducing the gap. In this study, we propose that gendered interaction patterns in educational settings may influence how women and men engage with and apply financial knowledge. Through a partnership with the Colombian government, we will investigate whether interaction patterns among participants and facilitators in a large-scale financial education program affect financial access and activity. We will collect field experimental and qualitative data to examine whether female entrepreneurs learn more or engage more effectively with financial tools when they receive financial education via different interaction channels.
Gender Stereotypes and Entrepreneur Financing
In this project, gender differences will be examined in external equity financing using administrative data on the population of start-ups in France. Female-founded start-ups are 27% less likely to raise external equity including venture capital. However, the gender funding gap reverses in female-dominated sectors, where female entrepreneurs are more likely to raise funding than male entrepreneurs. These observed gender funding gaps are not driven by the composition of founding teams or by differences across individuals regarding education, experience, ex-ante motivations or optimism. Moreover, this project shows that it is conditional on being backed with equity, entrepreneurs outperform in gender-incongruent sectors, suggesting that requirements for funding are higher for entrepreneurs that are minority in gender-incongruent sectors. The evidence is consistent with the existence of context-dependent stereotypes among investors. These findings suggest that equity investors could generate higher returns by investing in minority investors in gender-incongruent sectors - female entrepreneurs in male-dominated sectors and male entrepreneurs in female-dominated sectors.
2019-2020 Grant Recipients
Developing Helpful Habits: Designing Dynamic Interventions to Promote Financial Inclusion Among Women and People of Colour in Financial Savings Domains
Previous work has increased people’s knowledge of how to establish better savings habits and have developed various interventions to induce a change in behavior. However, these interventions typically only induce short-term behavior change, typically at a single decision point in time (e.g., choosing not to spend money on an indulgence, choosing to put money into a savings account). Moreover, many of these programs and interventions have ignored the unique struggles faced by women and other vulnerable and marginalized groups. Our research seeks to address this fundamental gap in the literature: Which types of interventions are effective at improving behavior over the long-term for a broader range of individuals (e.g., women, people of colour, LGBTQ communities, and those who have intersectional identities)? We have assembled an interdisciplinary team, combining researchers from consumer behavior, computer science, econometrics, and social neuroscience in order to design a more inclusive set of interventions that can foster motivation not only for the short-term but in ways that can have sustained success in the long-term as well.
Does Marriage Matter?: Understanding the Impact of Same-Sex Marriage on the Gender Pay Gap
Research has shown that married men earn nearly 11 percent more per hour than men who are unmarried, even after controlling for experience, age, and education. This “marriage premium” does not appear for women. While this work has sparked immense interest, it focuses on understanding cisgender men and women in heterosexual partnerships. Do lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgender and queer people in same-sex marriages experience these differences in wages, productivity and expanded economic social networks compared to either their unmarried or heterosexual counterparts? Using data collected from the 2016 and 2020 Collaborative Multi-Racial Post-Election Survey (CMPS), which oversamples people of color, we will apply an intersectional lens to uncover exactly how any marriage premium operates for LGBTQ people. Our findings will contribute to understanding the roots of a very old problem in the context of newly expanded LGBTQ rights.
She Said “Me, Too,” He Said “Not Me:” Situational Ambiguity and Sexual Harassment
Following the #MeToo movement, sexual harassment cases have been salient in the public eye. This has led to increased attention to mandatory and uniform HR training programs that may reduce harassment behaviors and clinical approaches that examine the characteristics of repeat perpetrators (“serial predator” models). However, given the wide spread nature of the phenomena, the problem likely extends beyond serial harassers. Here, we build upon a perspective that explains how even “good people” can routinely cross ethical boundaries: the situationist approach. Specifically, we propose that situations that create ambiguity around individuals’ actions will increase the likelihood of sexual harassment.
Strength in numbers: How gender group composition influences knowledge contribution
Cultural beliefs about gender affect how individuals behave within organizations, and more specifically how they contribute knowledge and ideas to their team. Organizations in male-typed industries have been actively engaging in initiatives to mitigate the pervasive influence of gender beliefs, yet with mixed success. Using a behavioral approach, the project’s purpose is to consider how gender group composition may help reduce gender beliefs’ impact on the willingness to contribute ideas and thus improve knowledge accumulation in teams.
A Closer Look or a Cursory Glance? Systematic Search Bias in Statistical Discrimination
In modern labor markets, employers, have access to many sources of fine-grained information about job seekers. But hiring managers still often rely on gender and racial stereotypes when making employment decisions. To address this puzzle, this research tests the hypothesis that hiring managers tend to devote more time and effort to finding individuating information about in-group applicants than out-group applicants; for example, white male hiring managers spend more time searching for additional information about white male job seekers than about female and non-white candidates. The results of this research will have potential implications for understanding and eliminating the causes of labor market discrimination.
Read András' paper in American Sociological Review.
Read GATE's research brief on András' research.
Effects of Media Outlet on Gender and Social Biases in Artificial Intelligence
We will train machine-learning models on diverse corpora to address four open empirical questions: (1) Do politically left- vs. right-leaning media lead to different kinds of social biases such as sexism, racism, and ageism? (2) Do politically more extreme (either left or right) vs. more moderate media lead to different degrees of social biases? (3) How robust are these biases across algorithm sophistication—or how minimal can the algorithms be while still exhibiting the biases? (4) Do these biases predict judgments and decisions in political and business contexts?
Read their paper in Cognitive Science.
Gender Differences in Response to Competition in the Workplace: Evidence from a Natural Experiment
Throughout the world, in business as well as in government, men are strongly overrepresented in top positions. One explanation is that men are more strongly motivated by competitive incentives. By now, there is some empirical support for such gender differences, often found in the lab. This project exploits a large-scale competitive tournament to examine gender differences in response to competition and the drivers of such in a real workplace. In particular, we focus on a typical service sector in China with both male and female workers and study how such competitive environment influences productivity as well as the decision to quit the job during and after the tournament for workers of both genders.
2018-2019 Grant Recipients
Salary disclosure laws and the gender wage gap
The gender wage gap in Canada has narrowed over time, but it remains significant. One hypothesis is that the pay gap persists because it is hidden. Building on this hypothesis, policy makers in many countries, including Canada, the US, the UK, and Norway, have proposed various pay disclosure requirements. The objective of this project is to test this hypothesis using worker-level data from Statistic Canada spanning over 40 years. We plan to exploit provincial variation in pay disclosure laws, and the timing of their implementation, to estimate the impact of such salary disclosure laws on the gender wage gap.Read their paper in American Economic Journal.
Learn more about this research in Harvard Business Review.
Compounding Losses: Labour struggles of immigrant women in STEM
Among university graduates in Canada aged 25 to 34, immigrant women are twice as likely to have a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) degree as Canadian-born women (23% versus 13%). Yet, immigrant women face some of the highest levels of labour market challenges in Canada across indicators, including: unemployment rate, wage gap, part-time employment, and low-income rate. We seek to document the complex gendered "work-finding" hurdles for immigrant women in STEM fields in order to begin examining the Loss on Investment (LOI) being absorbed by the Canadian economy due to this untapped talent.
View a short film based on their research here.
Gender differences in labour income dynamics as drivers of financial decision making
Labour income risk has been increasingly recognized as an important factor that affects individuals' decision-making processes. Given the structural differences in labour market access between men and women, and their constraints, we want to investigate whether such differences lead women and men to make different portfolio allocation choices; shifting their investments between "risky" and "non-risky" assets during periods of earnings shocks.
Choice architecture and women’s leadership ascension
In most organizations, promotion into leadership typically requires self-nomination via an application. However, past research clearly suggests that this process could put women at a disadvantage. Approaching this problem from a behavioral science perspective, we propose to apply well-established findings on "choice architecture" to the choice of applying for leadership positions. We hypothesize that using the "opt-out" choice framework will take the onus off of women (or people of any gender) to "lean in" to apply and compete.Read their paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Read GATE's research brief of their paper.
Learn more about Joyce, Sonia, and Nico's research in VoxEU.
Think-Leader-Think-Women: People turn to women leaders for teams with hidden goals
For this research, we propose that women are more likely than men to emerge as leaders, i.e., when teams must uncover hidden goals. Such goals require optimizing the team's capability given environmental constraints, and are thus goals we think that women will be more effective at identifying. Supporting this contention, the goal pursuit literature indicates that women are more likely to optimize goals by controlling and accommodating the environment, whereas men tend to rely on solely controlling the environment. Thus, we propose that women more than men will identify hidden goals, align the team behind such goals, and thus emerge as leaders among their team's members.
The Labor Market Impacts of Import Competition on Female Workers: Evidence from Peru
Trade liberalization affects labor market outcomes for male and female workers. In this study, we examine the gender-specific effects of exposure to import competition in Peru after China's accession to the WTO. By considering employment substitution within and across industries and in local labor markets, we aim to quantify the impact of import competition on labor market outcomes of females, as well as the main underlying channels. The outcomes of the study would inform policy makers about potential policies to mitigate the effects of globalization on the economic and social status of women - particularly in developing and low-income countries.
Read their paper in Labour Economics.
Read GATE's research brief on their paper.
Naming Brand Names: Is there a gender strategy?
When naming humans, clear gender conventions exist. In turn, people associate particular genders with particular characteristics. Do these stereotypes also apply to brand names? For example, is Nike (which is analogous to Mike) a "masculine brand"? If so, is that a desirable association to have? The broader question is whether-or-not firms have a gender strategy when naming brands. If so, what are they trying to accomplish when they make these choices? With this research, we seek to answer these questions.
Read their latest working paper.
An analysis of the organizational and economic consequences of gender equity policies
Sexual harassment is likely correlated to firm culture and other gender issues, such as gender pay inequities and LGBQT+ friendliness. This culture may finally be changing given the recent emergence of high profile harassment cases that led to the #MeToo movement; Which may act as an important catalyst of change throughout business and society. Thus, we aim to examine and document how the #MeToo movement changes the extent to which firms' gender policies are correlated with creativity, profitability, market valuation, sustainability, etc.
Read their paper in Journal of Business Ethics.
2017-2018 Grant Recipients
Impact on the gender pay gap of CEO exposure to gender imbalance during formative years
This project will explore the impact of formative years of CEOs on the gender gap in corporate offices that they manage. Specifically, it will assess the role of demographic characteristics of the area where the CEO grew up, his or her education and family background on the gender pay gap among corporate officers, capital allocation to and promotions of male and female managers, and other aspects of differential treatment of men and women.Read Mikhail's publication in The Review of Financial Studies.
Watch Mikhail discuss his research at the Rotman Magazine event, "Art of Change."
Scaling Up Gender Equality (how different ratings scales shape outcomes by gender)
Winner, American Sociological Association Granovetter Award for best article in economic sociology.
This project explores how different rating scales (e.g., 1 to 5 versus 1 to 10) magnify or attenuate differences in scores given to men and women in evaluations. By revealing which types of scales can reduce gender bias, our research has the potential to illuminate concrete interventions to reduce bias and advance women’s careers.Read András' paper in American Sociological Review.
Learn more about András' research in this article for Harvard Business Review.
Read GATE's research brief on András' paper.
Race, Gender and Agency in Leadership: An Examination of Intersectional Identities and Agentic Penalties
This research project will examine the effect of different agentic, leadership behaviors on evaluations of Black and White women leaders. I predict that unlike their White counterparts, Black women will be protected from agentic penalties where the described behavior aligns with stereotypes associated with their race and gender.Adding More Women to Corporate Boards: The Impact on Boards’ Advisory Effectiveness
We ask whether adding more women directors to corporate boards affects the boards’ advisory effectiveness, by measuring women directors’ incremental expertise contribution. By providing empirical evidence on the current, world-wide debate on female director quotas, this study could yield crucial policy implications.Read Daehyun's paper in American Economic Review.
Read an interview about this research in Forbes India.
Playing the Inside Game versus the Outside Offer Game: How Men and Women Respond to Workplace Successes and Failures May Drive the Gender Pay Gap
It is well known that there is a gender pay gap; women receive less pay than men for doing the same work in the same positions. We propose that this discrepancy may be partially driven by differences in the way women and men respond to successes and failures in the workplace. More specifically, we propose that women may respond to losing out on a promotion by increasing their commitment inside the workplace (i.e., increasing organizational citizenship behaviours) while men, in contrast, may be more likely to increase their utility to the organization by searching for a higher paying outside offer (subsequently leading the employer to match the offer, creating this pay gap).Shifting Stereotypes to Improve Leadership Aspiration and Self‐Efficacy among Female Leaders
In this project, we aim to develop a novel and impactful intervention for reducing barriers to leadership among women in a way that minimizes backlash and negative spillover effects. By changing the framing of the leadership role to include more traditionally feminine attributes, we hope to increase the perceived compatibility between the female gender role and the leader role and to increase leadership aspiration and leadership self‐efficacy among women.Read their paper in Academy of Management.
Learn more about this research in UCLA Anderson Review.
Barriers to Reporting Sexual Harassment and Assault
Sexual harassment and assault are under reported in academic and professional environments, and organizations often lack evidence-based reporting policy. We use a randomized experiment, among university students, to test innovative reporting tools that make reporting easier and increase credibility by matching students who report the same offender; these tools are designed to encourage reporting and deter perpetrators.Gender and Awards in Financial Industries
For many professions, especially in finance, career progression and promotion relies heavily on awards and public recognition. Our project examines the role of gender in receiving awards, particularly the impact of pioneering women who receive awards as well as the impact of gender/role typical behavior.