Emergence of Gender Differences in Non-Cognitive Matters
An Elementary School-Age Experiment
Research Project
A growing literature on gender differences has shown that women are more risk-averse, less effective negotiators, less confidence, less able to express themselves and share their ideas, and more likely to underplay the role they could play in contributing to the health of the group.
These differences are likely to result in gender differences in venture capital success; if one does not take risks, express oneself well, or have strong leadership skills, it is difficult to run a business or attract investors.
In this project, we will study how a specific kind of non-cognitive skill from capital-risk - pitching - might affect girls’ psychological traits, perception, and academic achievement. The evaluation will be a three-pronged process:
- First, we will survey parents online to measure the differences in how they perceive assertiveness in boys and girls and to document differences in parental investment in developing the non-cognitive skills of their child according to gender.
- Second, we will conduct an experiment using elementary school children in Norway to assess the impact of a pitch contest on the self-confidence, assertiveness, and self-concept of girls.
- We also plan to combine the data from our experiment with data from the Norwegian registry, an administrative dataset containing extremely rich information on children’s academic performance and their parents’ performance on the labor market.
The results of our study could potentially be used to design scalable tools that could be engaged with by schools and policy makers who want to address early-stage sexist behavior.
Researchers
Clémentine Van Effenterre is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Toronto. Previously, she was a WAPPP Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School. She obtained her PhD in Economics from Paris School of Economics in 2017, under the direction of Pr. Thomas Piketty.
Her principal research interests are work, education, and empirical political economy. Her research interests include theoretical and empirical analysis of various subjects, including the impact on institutional constraints on maternal labor supply and the gender gap in science and technology.
MOST RECENT PUBLICATIONS
"Papa Does Preach: Daughters and Polarization of Attitudes toward Abortion" (2020) Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, vol. 179: 188-201"School Schedule and the Gender Pay Gap"
IZA Discussion paper n°13791, October 2020
Siri Isaksson
Assistant Professor in Behavioral Economics at the FAIR group at the Norwegian School of Economics.
Siri Isaksson is an assistant professor in Behavioral Economics at the FAIR group at the Norwegian School of Economics. She recently got her PhD in Economics at the Stockholm School of Economics Her primary research areas are experimental and behavioral economics. Specifically, she is interested in understanding how gender differences in everyday decision-making translate into unequal outcomes for men and women.
In her most recent article, “It Takes Two: Gender Differences in Group Work,” Siri demonstrates that women consistently under-credit their contributions to shared work - and that this effect is strongest among women who contribute the most, and work on complex solutions.
Together with her co-authors, she has also studied gender differences in retaliation and advice seeking. She has also collaborated on several replication studies.
She holds an M.Sc from the Stockholm School of Economics and a B.Sc. from Humboldt University of Berlin.
MOST RECENT PUBLICATIONS
Camerer, Colin F., et al. "Evaluating the replicability of social science experiments in Nature and Science between 2010 and 2015." Nature Human Behaviour 2.9 (2018): 637-644.Camerer, Colin F., et al. "Evaluating replicability of laboratory experiments in economics." Science 351.6280 (2016): 1433-1436.
Sa-Kiera Hudson is a recent doctoral graduate from the (Social) Psychology department at Harvard University. She completed her BA in Biology and Psychology from Williams College, doing a thesis under the guidance of Dr. Jennifer Randall Crosby on subjective power’s role in predicting the desires of in-group and out-group members.
MOST RECENT PUBLICATIONS
Charlesworth, T. E., Hudson, S. K. T., Cogsdill, E. J., Spelke, E. S., & Banaji, M. R. (2019). Children use targets’ facial appearance to guide and predict social behavior. Developmental psychology, 55(7), 1400.Hudson, S. K. T. J., Cikara, M., & Sidanius, J. (2019). Preference for hierarchy is associated with reduced empathy and increased counter-empathy towards others, especially out-group targets. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 85, 103871.