Seminar Gender, Behavior and Decision-Making

The next session of the seminar "Gender, Behavior and Decision-Making" will take place on Tuesday the 13th of December from 5 pm to 6 pm online (Teams). The Teams will be communicated in due time. 

We will have the pleasure to listen to Christiane Schwieren who will present "Sex, dark traits, and leadership emergence“ coauthored with Haang Jeung-Maarse, Lea Altmeyer, Martin Vollmann, Simon Kirsch and Koen Schruers. 

Christiane Schwieren is full professor of Organizational Behavior at the Alfred Weber Institute of Economics, Heidelberg University. She received her PhD from Universiteit Maastricht (Netherlands) in 2003 and held positions at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain) and Universität Mannheim before becoming a professor at Heidelberg University. Her main research focus is on behavioral gender economics, and on the effects of stress and mental health issues of economic behavior in the laboratory and in field settings within firms. She also works on data sharing and methodological issues of experimental and behavioral economics. Besides her research and teaching, she is also the equal opportunities officer of her faculty and of Heidelberg University.   

ABSTRACT 
Women continue to be underrepresented in leadership positions. While structural obstacles are held primarily responsible for female underachievement and have been described before, we were more interested in which individual decisions might result in leadership emergence. Therefore, we explored whether women compared to men would differ in economic decision-making (low promotability, social value orientation, delay discounting) depending on their dark personality traits (high versus low) and social contexts (single-sex versus mixed-sex settings). We found that it depended on the task and social context whether sex or dark traits influenced economic decision-making. Women, especially those low in dark traits, volunteered more often for tasks of low promotability than men in the mixed-sex but not single-sex setting. In contrast, it was independent of sex and setting that individuals high in dark traits chose for individualist strategies while those low in dark traits acted in a more prosocial way. In delay discounting, there were no effects of neither sex nor dark traits. Finally, there was a correlation between outcomes in the promotability game and social value orientation only in women low in dark traits in the single-sex setting. Our data are consistent with the view that societal role expectation shapes female economic decision-making related to leadership emergence, this is especially true for women low in dark traits.