Using Social Recognition to Address the Gender Difference in Volunteering for Low-Promotability Tasks

Research shows that women volunteer significantly more for tasks that people prefer others to complete. Such tasks carry little monetary incentives because of their very nature. We use a modified version of the volunteer’s dilemma game to examine if nonmonetary interventions, particularly social recognition, can be used to reduce the gender gap associated with such tasks. We conduct a laboratory experiment with three treatments where (a) a volunteer receives positive social recognition, (b) a nonvolunteer receives negative social recognition, and (c) a volunteer receives positive social recognition but a nonvolunteer receives negative social recognition. Our results indicate that social recognition increases the overall probability that an individual volunteers. Positive social recognition reduces the gender gap observed in the baseline treatment, and so does the combination of positive and negative social recognition. These findings suggest that public recognition of volunteering for such tasks can change the default gender norms in organizations and increase efficiency simultaneously.

This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis.

Funding: This research was primarily funded by the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore [Seed Grant 7399FW].

Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.04017.