Do Female Experts Face an Authority Gap? Evidence from Economics

Hans Henrik Sievertsen () and Sarah Smith ()
Additional contact information
Hans Henrik Sievertsen: University of Bristol
Sarah Smith: University of Bristol

No 17029, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper reports results from a survey experiment comparing the effect of (the same) opinions expressed by male versus female experts. Members of the public were asked for their opinions on topical issues and shown the opinion of either a male or a female economist, all professors at leading US universities. We find, first, that experts can persuade members of the public - the opinions of individual expert economists have an effect on public opinion - and, second, that the opinions expressed by female economists are more persuasive than the same opinions expressed by male economists.

Keywords: economic expertise; persuasion; gender; stereotypes; survey experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A11 D83 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2024-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-gen, nep-hpe, nep-lab, nep-pke and nep-sog
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp17029.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:iza:izadps:dp17029

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().