Gender, Behavior and Decision-Making 4

The next session of the seminar « Gender, Behavior and Decision-Making » will take place on Tuesday the 8th of February from 5 pm to 6 pm online (Teams). 

We will have the pleasure to listen to Thomas Buser who will present " The origins of gender differences in competitiveness and earnings expectations: Causal evidence from a mentoring intervention” (with Teodora Boneva, Armin Falk and Fabian Kosse).

Thomas Buser is Professor of Behavioral Applied Microeconomics at the University of Amsterdam and a research fellow at the Tinbergen Institute. He is currently the PI on a 5-year ERC Starting Grant (2019-2024).  

Most of Thomas' research is concerned with the link between personality traits and career outcomes. In his work he uses lab and field experiments as well as registry and survey data.  

Abstract : We present evidence on the role of the social environment for the development of gender differences in competitiveness and earnings expectations. First, we document that the gender gap in competitiveness and earnings expectations is more pronounced among adolescents with low socioeconomic status (SES). We further document that there is a positive association between the competitiveness of mothers and their daughters, but not between the competitiveness of mothers and their sons. Second, we show that a randomized mentoring intervention that exposes low-SES children to predominantly female role models causally affects girls' willingness to compete and narrows both the gender gap in competitiveness as well as the gender gap in earnings expectations. Together, the results highlight the importance of the social environment in shaping willingness to compete and earnings expectations at a young age.