Gender Differences in Job Entry Decisions: A University-Wide Field Experiment

The gender difference in competitiveness has been cited as an important factor driving the gender gap in labor market outcomes. Using a field experiment with more than 35,000 university students, I explore the impact of compensation scheme on willingness to apply for a job. I find that competitive compensation schemes that depend on relative performance disproportionately deter women from applying. I do not find the same deterrence effect under a compensation scheme in which students face uncertain payoffs independent of performance. I also test the impact of describing the job as helping a charity, and this increases the willingness to apply but does not affect the gender gap. My findings are important for managers, who need to understand the impact of different compensation schemes on the share of women recruited for a job posting.

The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2018.3107.

This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics.