Do Women Shy Away from Public Speaking? A Field Experiment

Maria De Paola (), Rosetta Lombardo, Valeria Pupo () and Vincenzo Scoppa ()

Labour Economics, 2021, vol. 70, issue C

Abstract: Public speaking is an important skill for career prospects and for leadership positions, but many people tend to avoid it. We run a field experiment to analyze whether in an incentivized setting men and women show differences in their willingness to speak in public. The experiment involved more than 500 undergraduates who could gain two points to add to the final grade of their exam by presenting solutions to a set problem orally. Students were randomly assigned to give a presentation to the instructor only or in front of a large audience (a class of 100 or more). We find that while women are more willing to do a face-to-face presentation, they are considerably less likely to give a public presentation. We show that female aversion to public speaking does not depend on differences in ability or other psychological attitudes. Such an aversion seems considerably less marked for daughters of working women. The aversion to public speaking cannot be interpreted as strategic avoidance deriving from women anticipating their poor performance in this specific task. From survey data we also show that neither increasing the gains deriving from public speaking nor allowing participants more time to prepare lessens the gender gap.

Keywords: Public Speaking; Psychological Gender differences; Gender; Leadership; Glass Ceiling; Field Experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D91 M50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0927537121000361
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: DO WOMEN SHY AWAY FROM PUBLIC SPEAKING? A FIELD EXPERIMENT (2020)
Working Paper: Do Women Shy Away from Public Speaking? A Field Experiment (2020)
Working Paper: Do Women Shy Away from Public Speaking? A Field Experiment (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:labeco:v:70:y:2021:i:c:s0927537121000361

DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2021.102001

Access Statistics for this article

Labour Economics is currently edited by A. Ichino

More articles in Labour Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().