Research Colloquium - Underconfident Women Earn Less
Time
Tuesday, 14. May 2019
15:15 - 16:45
Location
F425
Organizer
Junior Professorship in Behavioral Economics
Speaker:
Rupert Sausgruber (WU Vienna)
Underconfident Women Earn Less
joint with Alexander Rabas and Jean-Robert Tyran
Abstract
Women systematically sort into different jobs than men, but isolating why they do is difficult in the field. We study job choices in a clean environment that allows us to focus on the role of beliefs about one’s own productivity for job sorting. Using a quasi-representative sample of the Danish population, we find that highly productive women are about twice as likely to be underconfident as similar men, and therefore sort into jobs that pay less. We match experimental choices with income data from official registers and find that women who are highly productive but underconfident in our experiment also earn less than their equally productive peers in the field.