The Gender Gap in Top Jobs – The Role of Overconfidence

Anna Adamecz-Völgyi and Nikki Shure

No 15145, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: There is a large gender gap in the probability of being in a "top job" in mid-career. Top jobs bring higher earnings, and also have more job security and better career trajectories. Recent literature has raised the possibility that some of this gap may be attributable to women not "leaning in" while men are more overconfident in their abilities. We use longitudinal data from childhood into mid-career and construct a measure of overconfidence using multiple measures of objective cognitive ability and subjective estimated ability. Our measure confirms previous findings that men are more overconfident than women. We then use linear regression and decomposition techniques to account for the gender gap in top jobs including our measure of overconfidence. Our results show that men being more overconfident explains 5-11 percent of the gender gap in top job employment. This contribution is statistically significant although small in magnitude. This indicates that while overconfidence matters for gender inequality in the labor market and has implications for how firms recruit and promote workers, other individual, structural, and societal factors play a larger role.

Keywords: gender gaps; inequality; overconfidence; labor market (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I24 I26 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 53 pages
Date: 2022-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-gen, nep-hrm, nep-lma, nep-ltv and nep-neu
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Published - published in: Labour Economics, 2022, 79, 102283

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Journal Article: The gender gap in top jobs – The role of overconfidence (2022)
Working Paper: The gender gap in top jobs – the role of overconfidence (2022)
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