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To boost diversity, organizations are increasingly using “diversity incentives,” or payouts for managers or executives dependent on progress towards a specific diversity goal. Diversity incentives can affect both actors—managers incentivized to meet the goal—and targets—marginalized group members who are the focus of the incentivized goal. While the effects of incentives on actors are well-documented, it is unclear how targets will be affected. In this seminar, Erika Kirgios will examine how gender diversity incentives affect women’s aspirations to lead, addressing two competing perspectives: on the one hand, diversity incentives may generate identity threat and concerns about backlash among women; on the other, they may be viewed as costly signals that managers will support women’s leadership aspirations. In exploring this question across a field experiment at a global engineering firm and several follow-up studies, this work offers new insights on the drivers of female leadership aspirations. 

Erika Kirgios is an Assistant Professor in the Behavioral Science group at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. She studies workplace inequality, with a focus on field-testing theoretically grounded interventions that can improve outcomes for marginalized group members. She is also interested in exploring women's strategic decisions when navigating potential discrimination in the workplace. Erika received her Ph.D. in the Operations, Information, and Decisions department at Wharton and graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University with a B.A. in Computer Science.

This seminar series will give participants an opportunity to engage with research that relates to the topics discussed in the book Make Work Fair. This virtual seminar is part of the Women and Public Policy Program's weekly spring seminar series: Make Work Fair. Attendance is open to all.