Gender bias in performance evaluations: The impact of gender quotas

Albena Neschen and Sabine Hügelschäfer

Journal of Economic Psychology, 2021, vol. 85, issue C

Abstract: The intention behind imposing quotas for women on corporate boards is to close the gender gap in economic participation and help women to be promoted within organizations. However, the broader social psychological literature lends support to ideas that affirmative action policies, such as quotas, may do more harm than good for the beneficiaries. We extend this idea beyond the affected beneficiaries and ask whether this unintended negative effect spills over to women who are not immediate targets of the quota, by signaling incompetence. We develop an experimental design to investigate whether the announcement (study 1) and the implementation (study 2) of a quota for women have a direct negative effect on performance evaluations and hence reinforce the existing gender bias in evaluation. We observed that the performance of women was evaluated significantly lower than that of men. However, this gender bias was limited to sequential (rating) evaluations and was not evident in joint (ranking) evaluations. The quota did not significantly influence the amount of this bias. In addition, we observed more pronounced sexism in males compared to females. Results of study 2 gave a hint to an association between higher sexism and lower evaluations of women’s performance. We also found some evidence for a stronger evaluation bias in females when controlling for sexist attitudes. Hence, our results imply that the bias, which is overall quite robust and strongly pronounced, is still affected by individual gender-related characteristics.

Keywords: Gender Bias; Gender Quota; Economic Participation; Gender evaluation; Gender Stereotype (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J08 J16 J48 J71 J78 K31 M14 M51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:joepsy:v:85:y:2021:i:c:s0167487021000210

DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2021.102383

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