Beliefs about Gender Inequalities, Narratives and Support for Gender Quotas

Luca Di Corato, Federica Esposito and Natalia Montinari

Working Papers from Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna

Abstract: Gender quotas remain controversial despite evidence of their effectiveness in reducing labor market gender inequality. We study how informational narratives about quotas affect support, and how effects depend on pre-existing causal beliefs about inequality. In a pre-registered survey experiment with 2,404 Italian workers and managers, we compare demand-side (discrimination, bias) versus supply-side (participation, confidence, role models) framings. All information increases unincentivized stated support, most strongly under demand-side narratives, but none affects the extensive margin of an incentivized donation, revealing a clear say-do gap. Conditional on donating, however, supply-side framing significantly raises amounts given. Open-ended responses show narratives reshape reasoning primarily among those with diffuse priors (generic cultural explanations). We formalize this in a simple model featuring misalignment costs and tail-driven effects: narrative success depends on the distribution of prior beliefs, which acts as a state variable determining optimal framing across contexts.

JEL-codes: D63 D83 J16 J22 J31 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-gen and nep-lma
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://amsacta.unibo.it/8871/1/WP1220.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:bol:bodewp:wp1220

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna ().