Do women overpreprare? An experimental analysis
Our project aims at establishing the existence of gender differences in overpreparing and at initiating a line of research that controls for behavioral traits, like risk aversion and self- confidence.
Studying overpreapring will help in designing optimal strategies to address gender differences in career planning and the pursuit of leadership, especially in STEM and other male-dominated fields. These fields might be especially affected by a tendency for overpreparing, as it is “anecdotal wisdom” that women have to be better than comparable men in male-dominated jobs.
However, it is neither trivial nor tautological to show that women specifically prepare too much. Being able to distinguish overpreparation from general risk aversion or under-confidence would allow for the development of more targeted interventions than just increasing confidence in general.
Researchers
Christiane Schwieren
Professor of Organizational Behavior, Alfred Weber Institute of Economics (AWI), University of Heidelberg (UHD)
My current research focuses on two broad areas: Decision making and self-regulation under stress and/or change and diversity and individual differences in labor market settings. Methodologically, I mainly use (lab and field) experiments, but recently also did some survey research and I do have one purely theoretical paper.
Other topics I have been working on are public good games, identity, framing, trust, and some contributions to experimental methods.
Humberto Llavador
Associate Professor of Economics, Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), affiliate professor of the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics, and researcher of the Institute of Political Economy and Governance (IPEG)
Humberto Llavador is a Tenured Associate Professor of Economics at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), an affiliate professor of the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics (BarcelonaGSE), and a researcher of the Insitute of Political Economy and Governance (IPEG). Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California-Davis, he has held visiting professorships at Yale University, the Grantham Research Institute (GRI) at LSE, INSEAD at Singapore, and Korea University. He is also a past scholar of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton.
His research focuses on the economics of climate change, political economy and welfare economics, with publications in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Americal Journal of Economics: Microeconomics, Theoretical Economics, the Journal of Public Economics, and Climatic Change, among others. He has taught at UPF, the Barcelona GSE, Yale University, INSEAD, Korea University, and the University of California-Davis. In 2012 he received the Recognition Jaume Vicens-Vives for teaching quality and innovation from the Catalan Government.
Cosima-Valerie Steck
Research Assistant, Alfred Weber Institute of Economics
Cosima-Valerie Steck is a Research Assistant, Alfred Weber Institute of Economics