Decoding Gender Bias: The Role of Personal Interaction

Abdelrahman Amer, Ashley C. Craig, Clementine van Effenterre and Ashley Craig
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Ashley Cooper Craig

No 11268, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Subjective performance evaluation is an important part of hiring and promotion decisions. We combine experiments with administrative data to understand what drives gender bias in such evaluations in the technology industry. Our results highlight the role of personal interaction. Leveraging 60,000 mock video interviews on a platform for software engineers, we find that average ratings for code quality and problem solving are 12 percent of a standard deviation lower for women. We use two field experiments to study what drives these gaps. Our first experiment shows that providing evaluators with automated performance measures does not reduce gender gaps. Our second experiment compares blind to non-blind evaluations without video interaction: There is no gender gap in either case. These results rule out traditional models of discrimination. Instead, we show that gender gaps widen with extended personal interaction, and are larger for evaluators from regions where implicit association test scores are higher. This dependence on personal interaction provides a potential reason why audit studies often fail to detect gender bias.

Keywords: discrimination; gender; coding; experiment; information (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D83 J16 J71 M51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-hrm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp11268.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Decoding Gender Bias: The Role of Personal Interaction (2024)
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:ces:ceswps:_11268

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().