 Female leaders and their response to the social environmentLata Gangadharan (), Tarun Jain, Pushkar Maitra and Joseph Vecci Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2019, vol. 164, issue C, 256-272 Abstract: Using data from two sets of experiments conducted in rural India, this paper finds that relative to men, women assigned to be leaders contribute less than what they propose in a public goods game. We examine whether this behavior is influenced by the social environment. We find that female leaders deviate negatively from their proposals more frequently than males, when the gender of the leader is revealed and in villages with a female head assigned through an exogenous affirmative action policy. Women leaders anticipating lower economic and social costs for their actions compared to male leaders are potential explanations for observed gender differences in behavior. Our results suggest that the social environment can influence the behavior and the potential effectiveness of female leaders. Keywords: Gender; Leaders; Governance; Affirmative action; Leadership experiment; Belief elicitation; India (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:jeborg:v:164:y:2019:i:c:p:256-272 DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2019.06.001 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D. More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier |
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