CeDEx Brown Bag Seminar - Xue Wang

Title: How Affirmative Action and Unconscious Bias Training Can Backfire: A Study on Self-promotion

Abstract: Evidence indicates that women are less likely to self-promote than men and this contributes to the gender gap in labour market outcomes. Affirmative action and unconscious bias training aimed at reducing or eliminating either the biases or their impact on decision-making have been widely adopted to improve gender equality. However, the efficacy of these interventions depends on the assumption that candidates do not adjust their behaviour in response to the interventions, and this may be invalid. Our theory predicts that efforts to make recruiters aware of gender differences in self-promotion and adjust their evaluations and decisions accordingly could encourage already self-promoting applicants to self-promote more. We design a lab experiment to test this prediction and explore the roles played by modesty and lying aversion. In the experiment, subjects are informed about how their pay will depend on their self-reported performance in a cognitive ability test. We exogenously vary the parameters in the payment rule across subjects. Specifically, we either reduce the marginal return on self-promotion or introduce a fixed downward “anti-bragging” adjustment. To enrich our analysis we also measure subjects’ intrinsic costs of immodesty and aversion to lying.