Laboratory Evidence of the Effects of Sponsorship on the Competitive Preferences of Men and Women

Many competitive career fields exhibit a gender gap in advancement. While entry cohorts may be balanced, there are far fewer women than men in senior positions. Sponsorship has become an increasingly popular solution to this gender gap. While mentors provide guidance and emotional support, sponsors go a step further. Sponsors take an active stake in their protégé’s success and advocate for their advancement. If their protégé is successful, both the protégé and sponsor benefit. Observational evidence indicates that sponsorship increases competitiveness, risk taking, and confidence among protégés. However, there is little direct evidence about the effects of sponsorship, and the evidence that does exist may suffer from a selection bias. It could be that the best employees are the ones that are most likely to be sponsored, but these individuals would have been successful without sponsorship. This selection problem is difficult to disentangle based on real-world data alone!

In this week’s WAPPP seminar, Professor Katherine Coffman discussed her research on a lab experiment designed to isolate the effectiveness of two key features of sponsorship. (Professor Coffman is being heavily recruited for a position at HKS, so we’re hoping that she enjoyed the talk as much as we did!) While working in a lab setting allows researchers to resolve the selection problem, it does narrow the focus to certain measurable aspects of sponsorship. In this case, Professor Coffman focused on what she calls the Belief Channel – that being sponsored is a vote of confidence in the protégé’s abilities that may increase their competitiveness – and the Payment-Tying Channel, which illustrates the link between the protégé’s success and the sponsor’s. These two features, competitiveness and earnings, are important for real-world outcomes, are easy to incentivize, and are easy to measure in a lab setting. It could be that the observed positive effects of sponsorship are due to something other than these two factors. However, if we see an effect of the Belief Channel and the Payment-Tying Channel, we may want to formalize these in sponsorship programs.

Professor Coffman’s experimental design parallels a famous study on competitiveness. Participants go through four rounds of a basic math task. In each round, they are given four minutes to solve as many addition problems as possible. The incentives for solving these problems vary across each of the rounds. In the first round, participants receive 50¢ for each problem they solve correctly. In the second round, researchers compare the performance of each participant. The top 25% earn $2 per problem solved, while the bottom 75% get nothing.

In round 3, participants get a series of choices about their incentives for the round. Over 9 binary-choice questions, participants are asked whether they’d rather get a guaranteed 50¢ per solved problem, or whether they’d rather get a certain dollar amount per problem for being in the top 25%. By varying the dollar amount, researchers are able to see what incentive level is enough to get participants to opt into the riskier competition-style incentive. Critically, participants have not gotten feedback on their performance in round 1 and round 2 and don’t know whether they placed in the top 25% in round 2.

Up to this point, all participants have had the same experience. After round 3, three participants are chosen at random to be sponsors, and all other participants become potential protégés. The key challenge here is balancing the selection effect (maybe only the best are chosen to be sponsored) with wanting sponsorship to be a meaningful vote of confidence. Professor Coffman strategically addressed this problem by creating a series of “matched pairs” for sponsors to choose from. This way, the sponsored and unsponsored groups had relatively equal ability, but the impact of being “chosen” was still meaningful.

All in all, there were four protégé treatments:

• Belief Signal participants were chosen by sponsors, but their sponsors did not earn money based on their performance.
• Payment-Tying participants were randomly assigned to a sponsor, but the sponsors earned 25¢ for every problem their protégé answered correctly if their protégé chose to compete and was in the top 25%.
• Belief Signal and Payment-Tying participants were chosen by sponsors, and their sponsors earned money based on the protégé’s performance. 
• Unsponsored participants were either never presented to a sponsor to be chosen or were not chosen by a sponsor. 

Participants were then asked to repeat the procedure from round 3—making a series of judgments about the necessary wage rate for them to opt into competition and then completing the task. The researchers examined differences in competitiveness and performance between rounds 3 and 4 to better understand the effects of sponsorship.

The three key metrics in the findings were the cutoff, the lowest wage at which a person was willing to compete, their performance, and their earnings.

In round 3, the average men's cutoff was $1.86, compared to $2.02 for women, which indicates a greater appetite for competition for men. Indeed, men were more willing to compete than women at every given wage rate. Men also outperformed women in round 3, solving about one more problem on average. As such, men outearned women in round 3 (average $11.25 versus $7.94). Conditional on performance, men outearned women by $1.03, which suggests that 1/3 of the gender gap is driven by choices about competition rather than performance.

In round 4, the unsponsored exhibited a smaller gender gap than in round 3. However, for each of the sponsored groups, the gender gap grew wider in round 4 than in round 3. While each group decreased their cutoff by about 20 cents, which shows that they became more willing to compete, cutoffs changed more for men than for women. Indeed, sponsorship increases the gender gap from 13¢ in round 3 to 37¢ in the Belief Signal group, 27¢ in the Belief Signal and Payment-Tying group, and 44¢ in the Payment-Tying group.

What makes this gender gap bigger? Sponsorship is intended to encourage talented but underconfident participants to make more competitive choices. It could be that this version of sponsorship isn’t having the intended effect for this target population. To test this, Professor Coffman examined participants’ beliefs about their abilities in rounds 3 and 4.

In the baseline data, both men and women are somewhat overconfident. More than half of men rate themselves in the top quartile! (In fairness, so do 34% of women). In general, the confidence gap between men and women is driven by women being underconfident, more likely to rate themselves below their true ability level.

Sponsorship treatments with the Belief Signal, the vote of confidence that a sponsor chose you, do increase participants’ confidence. Compared to the unsponsored groups, participants in the Belief Signal group rank themselves 0.2 quartiles higher, and participants in the Belief Signal and Payment-Tying Group rank themselves 0.17 quartiles higher. These changes in beliefs don’t vary with gender—everyone reacts to a vote of confidence in a similar way.

However, the group that was most likely to change their willingness to compete in round 4 was overconfident men. Women showed very little movement in their willingness to compete, whether they were overconfident, properly calibrated, or underconfident. This finding is a bit discouraging—improving confidence doesn’t impact those who need it most, but instead concentrates on those who already have plenty of confidence.

Professor Coffman also examined the effect of the sponsorship treatment on performance. In the real world, sponsorship is intended to have the biggest impact on the best performers. However, in this data, the strongest increase in willingness to compete came from men in the bottom three quartiles. There was very little change in willingness to compete for top-quartile men or for women at any performance rank. Participants in a Payment-Tying condition showed additional increases in their performance: having their sponsor’s compensation tied to their performance provides an additional incentive to do well. For women, the effect on performance was small, but for men it was significant. Not only was this group more willing to compete, but they were also improving their performance. This improvement in performance increased men’s earnings, while women’s earnings were not significantly impacted by any sponsorship treatment.

Sponsorship, therefore, is mainly reaching overconfident, low-ability men, and in this lab setting sponsorship fails to close the gender gap in competitiveness or earnings. Talk about unintended effects! The key takeaway, according to Professor Coffman, is that we’re not studying the parts of sponsorship that really matter for women. Other channels (like access to professional networks or sponsor advocacy in promotional meetings) may have a much greater impact. What features of sponsorship programs haven’t been examined that may be critical for closing gender gaps?

What Works: Closing the Gender Wage Gap in Boston

As part of HUB Week, the Women and Public Policy Program at the Harvard Kennedy School presented a panel discussion about the public-private-academic partnership facilitated by the Office of the Mayor of Boston and the Boston Women's Workforce Council that resulted in innovative, research-based interventions to reduce the wage gap in the city. Victoria A. Budson, Executive Director, Women and Public Policy Program moderated panelists Iris Bohnet,  Professor of Public Policy and Director of the Women and Public Policy Program; Megan Costello, Executive Director of the Mayor's Office of Women's Advancement, City of Boston; Katharine Lusk, Executive Director of the Initiative on Cities, Boston University; and Michelle Wu, Councilor At-Large, Boston City Council.

The first step to look for ways to reduce the wage gap is the applicant's first contact with any employer, the recruitment process. Professor Bohnet started the panel with a discussion about reducing bias in interview processes. Bias is very difficult to eliminate, we are all biased in one way or another, "it has something to do with how our minds work... we are all affected by these biases independent of our own demographic characteristics" she explained. Her research focuses on ways to "debunk" these cognitive glitches in order to improve recruitment and interview processes. Research has shown that interviews are not particularly strong tools for predicting future on-the-job performance, "blind evaluations are great, but in most of your jobs those aren't possible." What is the next best option? There is a way to structure an interview to make it more useful: "You should force yourself to ask every job candidate the very same five questions, in the same order, and ideally... compare question by question". She shared that this is actually the way she grades papers students write for her class!

WAPPP Panel Discussion on the wage gap in Boston, part of HUB Week

Katharine Lusk, who according to Victoria Budson, "really began the transition and change around these metrics in the city" followed Professor Bohnet's intervention. She talked about what former Kennedy School Professor Samantha Power referred to as being a "bureaucratic samurai", which essentially means having the ability to defy the status quo while still being able to operate within a bureaucratic setting. In Ted Kennedy's words, it means knowing how to operationalize good intentions. Katharine was working with former Mayor Thomas Menino, when he set out, in 2013, to make Boston "the premiere city for working women". They focused on creating evidence-based policy to benefit women, including capital resources for early educators, support for women entrepreneurs and women in STEM, and of course, pay equity. They created the Women's Workforce Council in a model of collaborative governance as "a new way of solving a very old and tractable problem". This effort brought talent to the table. The Mayor's Office then formed further coalitions with businesses and with a team at Boston University, which figured out a way for employers to share sensitive wage data anonymously, in order to provide the city with information that allowed them to determine just how large the wage gap is.

Victoria Budson noted that "it's really about whether your ideas catch fire", and that enlisting stakeholders beyond those who obviously benefit from a policy, as Katharine did, is key to getting things done in government. She then introduced the next speaker, Megan Costello, who spoke about her experience as the Campaign Director for Mayor Marty Walsh and now as the Executive Director of the Mayor's Office of Women's Advancement, who works closely with the Women's Workforce Council. "We have to be intentional about diversity," she said, and explained that their approach is three-pronged: they are focusing on working with businesses so they can join the data effort previously set up by Katharine Lusk and her team; secondly, they are working with individual women setting up helpful tools for them, like free workshops on salary negotiation, and finally, they are working on supporting equal pay legislation. Their aim is to really change the culture. Ambitious but possible.

Finally, City Councilor At-Large Michelle Wu, spoke about the importance of having leaders of different perspectives sitting at the table; they can pave the way for change. She said she is convinced there is no better place in the world to be making change than in Boston, a city that is blessed with incredible resources for innovation. "Government innovation is not an oxymoron!", she exclaimed. She spoke about her efforts, working together with the Mayor's Office, to make parental leave a reality for Boston families, and other work she had been able to do as a City Councilor like putting in place a training program for the Boston Housing Authority to assist domestic violence victims, and even make the forms at the Registry friendly for all types of families, including same-sex couples. As the youngest serving member of the Council and the first Asian American to be elected as Councilor, she was a true inspiration.

The audience was very enthusiastic and put forth a number of questions and comments. A wonderful closing for a conversation full of insights, new ideas, and exciting work, all pointing towards achieving equality for women.

What Works: Gender Equality by Design

Imagine the following situation: You are a young professional musician. And you are really good. Music is what makes your blood flow. Ever since you were a little girl, piano and violin lessons excited you rather than bored you. Today is a very important day for you: You're auditioning for a position in the National Symphony Orchestra. How would you feel if you knew that the minute you walked on stage, before even playing your instrument, your chances of being hired would decrease significantly?

Before research showed that having musicians audition behind a curtain, so the jury would not be able to tell their gender, increased the chance that a woman would be hired or promoted, and that these "blind" auditions alone could account for a third of the increase in the proportion of women musicians hired into top-tier American symphonies, female musicians would face just that scenario. The implicit biases of possibly well-meaning members of the jury would too often reduce women's chances to succeed in the audition.

Although we would all like to think we do not suffer from the same biases as the members of those juries, the opposite is likely true. During the first HKS Women and Public Policy Program seminar of the academic year, Professor Iris Bohnet explained that we are all biased in one way or another, "because seeing is believing". We observe patterns in the world, such as most kindergarten teachers being female, or most software engineers being male, so we come to expect people to fill those roles. Don't believe it? Take the test yourself.

Professor Bohnet is the Director of the HKS Women and Public Policy Program (WAPPP) and Co-chair of the Behavioral Insights Group at the Center for Public Leadership at HKS. During the seminar, she presented a preview of her forthcoming book “What Works: Gender Equality by Design”, in which she argues that we can use insights we learn from Behavioral Economics to close gender gaps caused by implicit biases.

Professor Iris Bohnet, Director of the HKS Women and Public Policy Program

These insights allow us to create “nudges", which are small actions designed to obtain the most desirable reactions from people, building on knowledge of how the -often irrational- human mind actually works. In the book, she talks about "nudges we can use to make the world a better place", because they can reframe the environments in which we work. Best of all, they are mostly cheap and can be introduced quickly.

Professor Bohnet described previous approaches to increasing diversity in the workforce, such as diversity, leadership, and negotiation training, and underscored that there is not enough evidence to prove that these interventions work. On the other hand, interventions like long-term capacity-building or mentoring have been found to be very promising. In a study that followed the career trajectories of women economics professors who were randomly assigned into a long term mentorship program, the professors in the program fared better than those in the control group.

She mentioned many other nudges to redesign the work environment, like putting up more images of female leaders -"what you see matters in what you think is possible for yourself"-, avoiding panel interviews, assessing job candidates on a pre-determined set of questions immediately after the interview, highlighting the increased presence of gender mixed corporate boards rather than their low proportion, and many more. Professor Bohnet is handing in the manuscript for the book next week, so look forward to reading more when it comes out!

The Work-Family Narrative and How It's Hurting Women

Gender inequality in the higher echelons of the corporate world has made the news a lot lately – from the UK to Nigeria to Ireland, but the discussion at this week’s WAPPP seminar, "The Work-Family Narrative as a Social Defense: Explaining the Persistence of Gender Inequality in Organizations," focused on the discrepancy in American professional service firms. Despite large gains at the associate level of such organizations, where female employees now comprise roughly half of the workforce, women are severely underrepresented in elite positions. According to the 2013 Catalyst Census, only 15% of C-Suite executives in Fortune 500 companies are women.

Robin Ely, a Professor of Business Administration and Senior Associate Dean at Harvard Business School, presented her research and hypothesis on why such inequality persists. She and her coauthors Irene Padavic and Erin Reid conducted interviews with 107 professionals in a mid-size global consulting firm, where 90% of partners were male. Most employees surveyed said they believed that the inequity was due to the fact that women are disproportionally affected by personal obligations, which can hold them back in a corporate environment where 70-hour weeks are common.

This idea isn’t new; it has been circulated in the news media for over a decade since it was first prominently discussed in a 2003 New York Times Magazine article titled, “Why Don’t More Women Get to the Top? They Choose Not To.”

Professor Ely has an alternative hypothesis, however: that this phenomenon is caused by overselling and over delivery (i.e. overpromising) on the part of partners, paired with associates’ compliance in order to stand out as strong employees.

This creates a 24/7 work culture within elite firms that makes it virtually impossible to balance one’s personal and professional lives, for both men and women. Instead of addressing this culture head on, Ely et al argue that employees use a social defense (a collective arrangement used by an organization to protect against threats and conflicts) to fend off the anxiety this conflict causes.

This social defense splits the professional and personal spheres and then projects the latter onto women. By psychologically assigning women to the private sphere (what Ely calls “privatizing women”), organizations perpetuate the idea that women will prioritize their personal life over their professional one, making them less able to take on management work.

Unfortunately, policy changes may not be enough to resolve this pervasive issue. For example, many elite firms have improved their family leave policies, but women still overwhelmingly use these policies compared to men. Ely argues that a shift in culture is needed, paired with dialogue that references the changes and what they mean for the narrative of the organization.

Download the seminar podcast (right click and save)

Are Women Punished for Seeking Power?

One of the catch-22s of gender relations these days is that women are hemmed by both realistic power structures that do exist, as well as by perceptions of what ‘should’ exist.

Specifically regarding gender stereotypes, many people expect not only that women are more modest in their presentation and interactions, but that they should be more modest.

So what happens when women violate these stereotypes?

That was the question that Professor Victoria Briscoll of Yale University posed in her seminar on “Women and Power: Hard to Earn, Difficult to Signal, and Easy to Lose.” She broke her answer into three parts.

First, women often have to manage people’s impressions of their rise to power. Their intention of seeking power and authority appear inconsistent with people’s perceptions that women should be communal and not dominating. So even female politicians like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Patty Murray, who are essentially in the business of power, often downplay the fact that they are there, insisting that they “never expected to run for office.”

Second, once in power, men and women often communicate differently to continue this impression management. According to a great deal of social psychological research, ‘powerful’ people are often given a license to talk more than people with less power, who signal deference. Moreover, women tend to lead in more democratic, non-hierarchical fashions than men. So in spaces like the US Senate floor, men talk to display power, while women tend to talk to establish and maintain relationships and advocate for communal rather than personal causes. This is often in the effort to avoid backlash.



Finally, women’s power is often more fragile and easily lost than that of men. In the case of expressing anger, women are almost always penalized for this, while angry white men are sometimes rewarded for being assertive. But when women can explain their anger away to an external source, women are rewarded.

So clearly there’s a lot of work for society to do. To get there, do women need to keep on adjusting what they do? How can we get societal expectations to change in the long run?

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Did the plough doom us to millennia of gender inequality?

'Women are supposed to stay at home and raise children.' 'Men are supposed to work and bring home money to provide for the family.'

Throughout the world, we have many ideas of which gender should be responsible for what---perhaps the most fundamental and universal has been employment roles. Why is that?

One theory has to do with the nature of work: the economic structures of "traditional" society were largely manual labor based, almost necessarily ensuring the centrality and dominance of the physically more muscular male in economic production. People have argued that this started with the plough thousands of years go: before the plough, men and women were equal economically in that both could till soil and gather food by hand with equal skill. Accordingly, they were largely equal socially, intellectually, and in terms of power.

But when the plough was invented, it required a great deal of upper body strength to produce more agricultural output. So the gathering work that women did became less economically relevant, and the remaining work was left to the physically stronger sex---by nature's course, this was usually the male. Most consequential economic activity became dependent on the successful physical performance of the male. This was furthered by the thought that women’s interaction with domesticated farm animals would reduce fertility levels.



In his seminar last week on “The Origins of Gender Roles: Women and The Plough,” Alberto Alesina of Harvard University explored the effects of this ancient technological innovation on today’s perception of gender roles. The fact that work was bifurcated along gender lines so long ago, he argues, has meant that these norms and expectations persist even centuries after humans moved beyond agriculture as the primary economic activity.

Controlling for things like ethnicity, politics, and geographic features, Professor Alesina and his colleagues matched up traditional and ancient plough usage with today’s women’s labor market participation and perceptions of gender equality and norms. They found that there is, in fact, a strong correlation between ancient plough usage and gender inequality today. That technology affected not just the realities of work, but also the norms, markets, institutions, and policies that were shaped around them.

Since then, however, we’ve seen some profound changes in economics. Urbanization and industrialization, for example, brought women back into the workforce in a large way and galvanized the women’s and labor rights movements---to say nothing of the service sector. And though today’s inequality may have its roots in ancient technologies, it is still propagated by harmful norms and narratives that we certainly can control.



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How can mothers win? Ending the bias against caretakers.

As we’ve seen, both women and men face challenges reconciling work-life integrity. Usually, individuals are forced to adjust their own behavior: share household burdens, manipulate supervisors’ perceptions, or just opt out entirely.

What makes this whole balancing process harder is that caretakers suffer a particular bias at work. In her seminar last week on “Reducing the Caretaker Penalty: Norms, Laws, and Organizational Policy,” Stanford University’s Shelley Correll demonstrated how mothers, for example, are paid less than both fathers and childless women---nearly 5-7% less per child, in fact. But it’s difficult to overcome this because of two absurd and paradoxical societal perceptions:

• The assumption that mothers are less committed to their office work
• The normative view that mothers should be more committed to their children than their office work-and if they’re not, they’re bad people.

If mothers try to work their way out of the caretaker bias, they’re seen as selfish, arrogant, and dominant, and are penalized accordingly. Basically, mothers can’t win!

So can laws change societal norms? Professor Correll explains how, yes, they can not only provide punitive protections but also create more symbolic social consensus that implies what’s right and wrong.

The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) gives employees that have worked for over twelve months in an organization with more than 50 people the right to 12 weeks of unpaid leave per year. Just knowing about FMLA and other organizational leave policies positively affects how colleagues view mothers and other caretakers who take short leaves. Even a limited law that’s weakly enforced can promote gender equity.

If we enable workplace leave more reflexively, we can prep society for more openness, namely to the reality that all people---men, women, rich, poor---have and must honor responsibilities outside of the workplace. As Professor Correll put it, “work should be a verb, not a place,” and Best Buy’s management has pioneered Results Only Work Environments (ROWE), where employees are paid for results and output rather than the number of hours worked.

Convincing employers and supervisors of the merits of this kind of flexibility might be more difficult, because they may have legitimate concerns about their workforce. But these employers ought to keep two things in mind. One is that their own expectations of different groups---women caretakers, African Americans, etc---are often incorrectly biased, and these are biases that impede a fair and efficient workplace. Another is that more flexible work environments will mean longer-term retention of good workers.

Low- and hourly-wage workers and their employers face another challenge: their work is inherently based on time commitment, and already feels risky. Even if they can afford it financially, these workers don’t want to take FMLA because it will prejudice their employers upon return.

Accordingly, good laws are even more important in these cases, setting the norm for what is right.

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If you can’t change the player, change the game

How many times have you heard people try to deny that they are prejudiced by saying that “some of my best friends are” black, gay, Republican, or women? I’ll bet it’s all too often.

Try as we might, most of us have some kind of latent bias that keeps us from being completely objective, even when we really want to be. Of course, too many of us are also pretty openly prejudiced. Both of these views get in the way of two things: equity and efficiency.

By equity, I mean that women in particular are underrepresented in most places of power---corporate boards, elected office, etc---in proportion to their population. By efficiency, I mean that there are tangible economic benefits to including different people, and women in particular, in decision-making.

According to Professor Iris Bohnet, Director of WAPPP and Academic dean at the Kennedy School, who presented her work on “Gender and Decision-Making” this week, women’s smaller appetites for risk-taking, more tempered competitiveness, and complementary perspectives may account for these contributions.

So how do we overcome these unintended biases and maximize these benefits?

One answer may lie in understanding and fixing “evaluation bias”. We often assess things based on factors completely unrelated to the thing itself. Our evaluations are often driven by the context around the subject, or our other assumptions or preconceived notions.

The Chubb Illusion: We think the center squares are different colors because of their surroundings
http://www.optical-illusion-pictures.com/famous.html 

For example, in many Indian villages people didn’t typically associate ‘leadership’ with women largely because they had rarely seen female leaders. But in 1993, women were required by a constitutional amendment to serve as the head of village councils, or Panchayat Raj, in one-third of all Indian villages---a change that familiarized the electorate with female leadership, and paved the way for further elections of women. (In 2011, 50% of all seats had to be filled by women).

This legislative change was a “nudge” in the right direction. By changing the context a little bit, people’s perceptions changed a little bit too. So if we adjust the process of hiring in different firms so that, for instance, candidates are referred to as “people” rather than as a “man” or “woman,” decision-makers might not be primed by their gender-based association, and instead choose based on merits alone. Similarly, if a school has to hire 5 professors in a year, it makes sense to hire them all at once, so any gender imbalances are immediately obvious when they’re seen in a single group---rather than letting gender slip past the radar in one-off hirings.

To tweak a phrase used by the rapper Ice T, if we can’t change the player, change the game. 

Is 'Opt'ing Out Even an Option?

Over the last year, Facebook Chief Operating Office Sheryl Sandberg, has made a splash with her “Lean In movement,” which seeks to elevate the role of women in the professional world. In her book and preceding TED talk, Sandberg---a former VP at Google, and former Chief of Staff at the US Department of Treasury---has been trying to “keep women in the workforce...because I really think that’s” why we have so few women leaders. “The problem…is that women are dropping out.”

At the New York Times, Lisa Belkin had written a piece called the “Opt-Out Generation, about educated mothers who have left a career to stay home, usually to take care of children. (Statistically, the revolution was limited to an economically fortunate few). More recently, follow-up articles have talked about how the promise of home life didn’t deliver: how “The Opt-Out Generation Wants Back In,” but is having trouble reintegrating into the workforce.


In last week's WAPPP Seminar, Opting Out among Women with Elite Education: Evidence, Causes, and Societal Consequences, Professor Joni Hersch of Vanderbilt Law School looks at how valid these views really are. She looks at national averages across different types of college-educated women, and finds that most opting out is concentrated among married mothers who are graduates of elite institutions like Ivy League universities. To the extent possible, Professor Hersch even looked at how a woman’s parents’ educational background affects their current decisions; and indeed, the more educated her parents, the more likely she stayed in the workforce.

Women are more likely to stay in the workforce if they have science and engineering background; if they have graduate degrees; if they are employed in management, science, or health (rather than service or blue-collar industries); or if they are not married to very high-earning men.

Of course, as Anne-Marie Slaughter famously argued, the pressures on all women, in lower income and upper-echelon circles alike, to focus more attention on their own family remain strong---maybe even biological. The option to have a better work-life balance ought not be limited to those of elite educations, backgrounds, and industries, nor should this only pertain to women. Women that are not able to pay for nannies and other surrogate caregivers are particularly in need of “opting out” themselves.

Some steps toward that include lowering institutional barriers to that work-life flexibility: increasing public funding and other access to childcare and family leave, through legal protection.

That's definitely a vital start. But a sad paradox is that many industries that have welcomed women over the last decades---from increasing their numbers to improving work-life balance---have supposedly lost their economic and social “prestige” at the same time, making even that hard-won progress seem incomplete.

So, even as we start to change institutions and policies, we've got to influence how people think of their work and colleagues as well.

Heroes and Sheroes - Inspiring Women's Political Participation

All of us have heroes. People we’ve seen succeed; whom we want to emulate. When we have something in common with those heroes, it’s even more inspiring: that success feels even more tangible because, “if they can do it, so can I!”

But female political heroes are unfortunately too difficult to come by. Women represent over half of the population in most countries. And when women are involved in policy-making, there are often better education, health, and economic mobility outcomes for the whole society. Yet women make up only 11% of elected political office in India, 18% in the US, and 22% in the UK and China! Getting a few more women---even by quotas---should inspire others to participate too, right?

At today’s WAPPP Seminar, Lakshmi Iyer of Harvard Business School presented her research on “Path Breakers: How Does Women’s Political Participation Respond to Electoral Success?” Professor Iyer and her colleagues look at state level elections in India to see whether simply having women candidates run and succeed affects whether more women will try to run in the future. They crunch a lot of interesting data, and conclude that there is, in fact, an increase in the number of women who run as candidates after they see other women succeed.

But in looking at some of the details, they also find that most of this increase is simply because earlier female candidates run again (rather than new women necessarily getting inspired), and that there’s no impact on whether more women will vote.

If you want to increase and sustain the number of women in higher elected office, simply encouraging quotas---a requirement on the number of women in an elected body---may not be the best way. In India, the nature of democracy may be a stranger impediment: parties tend to select candidates not based on their aptitude or ideology, but by their "winnability"---which often includes association or family connections. Leaving the process to itself, according to Professor Iyer, may not change the situation for generations.

Yet the effect of their presence---even if enforced by quotas---on policy-making may be an important factor. If the mere presence a woman on a governing body can have a tangible influence on how that organization functions and what it does, it might well be worth it, regardless of how she got there.

The Politics of Work - Family Policies in France, Germany, and Japan

The issue of women, mothers, and work has received a lot of attention in recent headlines: which women have the choice to "lean in," try to "have it all," or find some balance that best fits their lives? Just how far can a mother (or father!) lean in when holding a small child without toppling over, and what kind of work policies permit more choice in these matters?

Patricia Boling, Associate Professor of Political Science at Purdue University, dove into these questions as she researched fertility rates, parental leave policies, and child-care options in three different countries. Fertility rates - more easily understood as the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime - are an important driver in adjustments to national work-family policies.  France, Germany, and Japan have all faced low fertility rates. This is not necessarily a state concern about women choosing fewer children; rather, the concern here is usually about the economics of supporting an aging population with a decreasing working-age population.

France tackled the issue of declining fertility rates at the turn of the last century, and its pronatalist policies and outcomes may offer some guidance to nations looking to impact their declining populations. The long-standing French policies that support child rearing include a 3-year long gender neutral paid leave, free public school for toddlers, and tax incentives for additional children. Germany followed suit in 2007 by offering a year of paid leave and an increase in state child-care spaces for 1-year-olds. Japan has been adjusting family policies, known as "Angel Plans," since the 1990s, increasing dual-partner leave time, compensation, and supporting child-care programs.

These all sound great, but just how successful have they been? As Professor Boling points out, national work-family policies matter, but no country is a blank slate. Many factors influence a woman's choice to have children: their culture, the political economy of the labor force, gender wage gaps, and the practical impact parental leave has on career choices. The success of work-family policies is often constrained by these factors as well. Institutional capacities, the tradition of administrative political action, the relationship between national policies and local implementation, and the traditions of businesses as political actors and their relationship with training and expectations from employees also impact how these policies play out.

France has experienced some successes with its policies, though challenges remain with the gender balance of parental leave. The long parental leave offers low pay for the parent who chooses to take it, and there are only 11 days of specified paid paternity leave. As a result, women often take repeated leaves and stay in low-skilled jobs with little chance for advancement. While fathers could conceivably take the longer leave, the incentive structure and labor force economy are such that the "gender neutral" leave is in-name-only.  Germany's adoption of child-care policies has a strong correlation with geography and history: the former East Germany has high rates of toddlers attending child-care, while the West and South have lower rates and a cultural aversion to mothers who do not stay home with their young children. Japan is more challenged by a number of institutional factors. It has the largest "mommy penalty" in the world: the gendered wage gap between women, men, and mothers. Businesses expect loyalty from employees and are hesitant to invest training in women of childbearing age. These same businesses play a major role in political processes, and may limit the success of attempts to adjust practices.

The lessons to be learned about work-family policies are still developing, as nations around the world continue to shape their responses to declining fertility rates. Professor Boling's discussion was a brief insight into a book currently underway. As our own national conversation continues about leaning in, stepping out, having what we can or want, it is worthwhile to keep our eyes open to other nations and their approaches to women, work, and family.


Valerie Kane is an MPP Candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Fill In the Blank - WAPPP Seminar Series

The Woman: Katie Baldiga, Doctoral Candidate, Harvard University
The Talk: Gender Differences in Willingness to Guess and the Implications for Test Scores
The Question: Do Men and Women Perform Differently on SATs?

The short answer, according to Katie Baldiga of Harvard University, is yes.

In a recent study, Baldiga discovered that when men and women were given multiple choice tests, men were more likely to guess answers they didn't know, while women were likely to skip questions they didn't know, resulting in an on-average reduction of 5 points from their raw score. In SAT terms, this is a 70 point drop.

This carries implications for how men and women perform in testing environments, says Baldiga, because the data suggests that such tests reward risk-takers rather than those who are risk averse. Ruling out lack of knowledge or confidence as factors, Baldiga was able to find a link between women's risk aversion, their desire to compete, and how many questions they skipped. The results have interesting implications: women answer only what they think they know, while men tend to answer regardless of the consequences.

The results carry important implications for future standardized test design. Might we, for instance, design a multiple-choice format that doesn't penalize skipped questions? Is there a way of controlling for risk in standardized tests?

If we do so, we may even the playing field between those who take risks and those who don't. Or, as Victoria Budson mentioned, we may even the playing field between those who guess right and few times, or those who guess wrong, but guess often -- and are rewarded for it.

*Photo courtesy of Education Week

Effie-Michelle Metallidis is an MPP1 candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School and a participant in WAPPP's From Harvard Square to the Oval Office program.

Do Women Make Board Meetings More Effective? - WAPPP Seminar Series

The Woman: Miriam Schwartz-Ziv, Fellow, Program on Corporate Governance, Harvard Law School
The Talk: When All Are A-board: Does the Gender of Directors Matter? (paper pdf)
The Question: Do Women Make Firm Boards More Effective?

Imagine you're a man walking into a meeting of your firm for the first time and see this group of individuals discussing decisions in the company:

Seems like a pretty normal set-up. A majority-male board -- which remains the standard in most private-sector firms -- awaits you.

Your group of 7-10 people will meet, discuss, and make recommendations to the CEO in an environment that is off the record, behind closed doors.

Now, imagine you walk into the same board room and see this:

Does the gender change effect how productive a company is?

According to Miriam Schwartz-Ziv, mixed gender boards that have 3 or more female directors present at meetings perform better than all-male boards.

Researching over a year's worth of minutes from 11 firms in Israel, Schwartz-Ziv was able to calculate small but significant rises in the amount of initiative boards took relative to previous meetings, as well as how much information the board asks from the CEO (when controlling for 3+ women, she found that there was an 87% increase in asking for information).

According to Schwartz-Ziv, these two metrics imply that there is a "peer monitoring" effect that forces the genders to be more proactive. "Women may tend to not assume as much as men do, so they ask for more information," say Schwartz-Ziv. "And because someone besides men is in the room, there's a feeling of needing to take action'."

What exactly is at play is hard to tell. Since board meetings happen behind closed doors, it's often difficult to understand how content, interpersonal relations, and personality play into the decision-making process. Since the study was conducted in Israel, it's also difficult to know if the results would be replicable in countries where gender parity is far wider, or where women do not have strong leadership roles in the private sector.

Lastly, is the peer monitoring effect a question of gender and status, or just gender? Put another way, if a female secretary were in the room instead of a director, would men still feel pressed to be more productive at their meetings?

While these questions remain, Schwartz-Ziv's study has important policy implications for firms that are thinking about whether or not they should factor gender into their leadership decisions. At best, there is evidence to imply that it may be better to encourage more female leadership at the decision-making process in order to make firms more productive.

How Are Women Doing? The World Bank Weighs in on Gender & Development - WAPPP Seminar Series

The Men: Sudhir Shetty, Sector Manager, Poverty Reduction and Economic Management, The World Bank; and Jishnu Das, Senior Economist in the Development Research Group, The World Bank

The Talk: World Development Report: Gender Equality and Development

The Question: Are women better or worst off than they've been in previous decades?

Not all inequalities are created equal.

At least, that's what researchers at the World Bank have concluded with the release of this year's Gender Development Gap report.

Sudhir Shetty and Jishnu Das, two economists who worked on the report, were on hand at WAPPP to present the latest findings to the Women's Leadership Board at WAPPP on how women have progressed around the world in the past few decades.

The results are positive, but reveal that there's still a long way to go.

While some areas such as education have improved dramatically, researchers says, inequality stubbornly persists in areas such as maternal mortality, HIV/AIDS infection, the wage gap, and domestic violence.

The reason, say Shetty and Das, is a complex interaction between markets, households and formal institutions that must all work together in order to ensure women are supported by every aspect of society.

For instance, curbing female mortality necessitates deep political will on the part of the government to reform its institutions. "I have never been to a district hospital in India where a doctor is not drunk after 8 o'clock," says Das. "The institutions are just not working, and these are the problems that effect female mortality."

The researchers say that there are ways to tackle these challenges. To reduce female mortality, for instance, countries must concentrate on improving clean water and sanitation so that infant girls stand a better chance of survival. A look at the historical data in the US and Europe revealed telling data to the team: as access to clean water improved at the turn of the 20th century, so too did the survival of baby girls.

Some challenges like domestic abuse, however, require a far more complex approach. Political will must drive an agenda that prioritizes the well-being of women and their children; economic opportunities such as access to land, better infrastructure, and greater emphasis on child care can all contribute to a shifting climate that empowers women within their households and in society. Buy-in from men is also a critical aspect in reducing domestic violence; as Shetty says: "This report is about gender -- not just women."

*Photo Image Courtesy of World Bank
Effie-Michelle Metallidis is a guest student blogger for the Women and Public Policy Program and Master in Public Policy first-year student at Harvard Kennedy School.