To support rigorous research, GATE offers annual research grants to qualified applicants.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 latest working paper.
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 latest working paper.
Read a summary of the 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.
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.
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.
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 working paper.
Learn more about Mikhail's research inspiration and design.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 latest working 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.
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 latest working paper.
Read a summary of the 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.
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.
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 working paper.
Learn more about Mikhail's research inspiration and design.
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.
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.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.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.