 The effect of task choice and task assignment on the gender earnings gap: An experimental studyKai Ou and Xiaofei Pan European Economic Review, 2021, vol. 136, issue C Abstract: Previous studies explain the gender earnings gap by gender differences in choosing competitive and higher-paying jobs. However, little is known about whether and how women’s earnings are affected when they choose more challenging jobs. In this study, we use a novel identification strategy to investigate 1) how the gender earnings gap arises from individuals’ self-selecting into different tasks and 2) whether mobilizing women to work on the tasks typically preferred by men increases women’s earnings and decreases the earnings gap. Our results show that men who prefer the hard and higher-paid task are more likely to obtain higher earnings regardless of the task they are assigned. In contrast, we find that women obtain higher earnings when they work on a hard and higher-paid task even if their initial take choice is the easy and lower-paid one. Our findings are consistent and robust across task stereotypes. Our results imply that mobilizing women to work on more challenging and rewarding tasks is likely to reduce the gender earnings gap. Keywords: Task choice effect; Task assignment effect; Gender; Experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:eecrev:v:136:y:2021:i:c:s0014292121001069 DOI: 10.1016/j.euroecorev.2021.103753 Access Statistics for this article European Economic Review is currently edited by T.S. Eicher, A. Imrohoroglu, E. Leeper, J. Oechssler and M. Pesendorfer More articles in European Economic Review from Elsevier |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.