Abstract

Advice processes are omnipresent in our professional and private lives. We use a laboratory experiment to study how gender and gender matching affect advice giving and how gender matching affects advice following about entry into a real-effort tournament. For advice giving we find that women are less likely than men to recommend tournament entry to advisees than are intermediate performers. Furthermore, women maximize less often the expected earnings of advisees than intermediate performers. For advice following we find that men enter the tournament significantly more often than women in the intermediate-performance group do. Gender matching does not seem to affect advice giving or following. Overall, when it is less clear what the better advice or decision is, gender differences emerge. These results are consistent with findings in other areas that document that gender differences emerge in situations that are more ambiguous.

۱٫ INTRODUCTION

Increasing women’s representation in top-level jobs is one of the main goals of gender equality policies in many countries. Identifying the causes of their current under-representation is a crucial input for the design of policies that can change this situation. There is now an established strand of experimental research (starting with Niederle and Vesterlund, 2007 and Croson and Gneezy, 2009) that studies this issue under controlled conditions where the decision to enter a real-effort tournament is used as a vehicle to study women’s attitudes towards competing for high-ranking jobs. The main result that comes out of this line of research is that, compared to men, ‘women shy away from competition’ and that they underestimate themselves. Niederle (2016) reports that this result has been replicated many times, for a newer replication in China see Carlsson et al. (2020). Buser et al. (2014), Buser et al. (2017), and Reuben et al. (2017) have shown that this laboratory measure of competitiveness is significantly correlated with real world outcomes such as career choices and income in the labor market.