What Works for Women Does Not Work for Men: A Large Field Experiment on Countering Gendered Occupational Choices

Patricia Palffy, Patrick Lehnert and Uschi Backes-Gellner

No 207, Economics of Education Working Paper Series from University of Zurich, Department of Business Administration (IBW)

Abstract: To foster gender equality and diversity in the workplace, firms and policymakers strive to attract women and men to gender-atypical occupations. However, particularly for men, such attempts have been of limited success. We theorize (a) that identity threat-related barriers hinder gender-atypical occupational choices, (b) that these barriers differ for women and men, and (c) that therefore the success of policy interventions aiming to encourage gender-atypical occupational choices differs for women and men. We conduct a large-scale field experiment with young women and men choosing their occupations when applying for their first job. We find that a brief intervention featuring counter-stereotypical framing and female role models in typically male jobs in STEM substantially increases women's applications for STEM jobs. However, an equivalent intervention featuring counter-stereotypical framing and male role models in typically female jobs in health and care does not increase men's applications for those jobs. Thus, strategies that work for women - such as portraying role models - do not necessarily work for men. To foster full gender equality in the workplace, firms and policymakers should not only continue investing in interventions aiming to attract women to male-dominated occupations but also develop interventions particularly focused at encouraging men to consider female-dominated occupations.

Keywords: occupational choice; gender typicality; occupational gender segregation; field experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I24 J16 J24 M59 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2022-05, Revised 2023-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-gen and nep-hea
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://repec.business.uzh.ch/RePEc/iso/leadinghouse/0207_lhwpaper.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:iso:educat:0207

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics of Education Working Paper Series from University of Zurich, Department of Business Administration (IBW) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sara Brunner ().