����vlog����

In this seminar, Professor Lata Gangadharan will discuss her research that investigates the ways in which perceptions, beliefs and stereotypes about women leaders are formed and influence behavior. She will present her recent research paper, joint with Nisvan Erkal and Boon Han Ko that uses incentivized experiments to explore whether different criteria are used in evaluating male and female leaders when outcomes are determined by unobservable choices and luck. In the experiments, evaluators form beliefs about leaders’ choices and make discretionary payments. They find that while payments to male leaders are determined by both outcomes and evaluators’ beliefs, those to female leaders are determined by outcomes only – a phenomenon the authors call the “gender criteria gap”. Their findings imply that high outcomes are necessary for women to get bonuses, but men can receive bonuses for low outcomes as long as evaluators hold them in high regard. This study provides an alternative perspective on how beliefs contribute to gender biases in the evaluation of leaders. Professor Gangadharan will discuss how policies aimed at addressing gender discrimination should go beyond simply targeting biases in beliefs, as beliefs are important not because they are inherently biased, but because they influence the determination of discretionary payments for male and female leaders in fundamentally different ways. 

Lata Gangadharan is a Professor of Economics, Joe Isaac Chair and Maureen Brunt Professorial Fellow at Monash University. Her research addresses incentives and preferences, exploring topics such as gender, social identity, prosocial and antisocial behaviour, and mechanisms to address social and environmental challenges. She has published in Science, Nature Communications, PNAS, American Economic Review, Economic Journal, European Economic Review, Leadership Quarterly and other leading journals. A Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, she is also President-Elect of the Economic Science Association and serves as Editor-in-Chief at Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organization and Associate Editor at Management Science. She is a former Co-Editor of Experimental Economics and has previously served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Economic Psychology, Economic Inquiry and the American Journal of Agricultural Economics.

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.