Gender Differences in Self-Promotion and Career Advice

Rigissa Megalokonomou, Juliana Silva-Goncalves and Roel van Veldhuizen

No 26189, RFBerlin Discussion Paper Series from ROCKWOOL Foundation Berlin (RFBerlin)

Abstract: We study the role of self-promotion and career advice in sustaining gender differences in labor market outcomes. We conduct a pre-registered experiment in which "advisers" advise "workers" to attempt either a more or a less ambitious task. We find that women promote themselves less than men and, as a result, are 12 percentage points less likely to be advised to choose the more ambitious task. This gender gap in advice persists across both quantitative and qualitative self-assessments and is robust to variation in advisers' information sets-including when advisers observe workers' actual performance-but is eliminated and even reversed when advisers are informed of the gender gap in self-promotion.

Keywords: Advice; Gender; Self-Promotion; Randomized Experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D91 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-07
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:crm:wpaper:26189

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