行動・実験経済学研究会

Oct 27th (Tuesday), 5th period (17:00–18:30), Room 909 of Building 3, Waseda Campus 

Speaker: KWON, HYOJI 

Title of talk: Explaining Inequality, Revealing Performance: Can Information Reduce Backlash under Gender Quotas? 

Type of talk: Research Presentation

Language: English/Japanese

Abstract: Women’s greater involvement in tasks with low promotability can limit their opportunities to build promotion-relevant performance records (Babcock et al., 2017). Because these records help determine subsequent opportunities, unequal work assignments can perpetuate disadvantages in advancement. Gender quotas can help interrupt this process, but experimental evidence documents backlash that may undermine their benefits. If coworkers do not observe the unequal assignments behind the records, they may attribute weaker performance to lower ability and regard quota beneficiaries as undeserving. We therefore propose a laboratory experiment to test whether explaining prior opportunity inequalities and revealing current individual performance can reduce selective backlash against promoted women. A 2×2 design independently varies these two public disclosures after promotion, holding the quota and unequal work assignments constant. The first disclosure explains how prior records were generated, while the second provides new individual evidence from assessments under equal task conditions. To allow backlash to be expressed through costly behavior, we give coworkers the option to spend their own earnings to reduce a counterpart’s earnings. We examine whether either disclosure, or their combination, reduces non-promoted men’s selective targeting of promoted women relative to promoted men. We also examine whether these disclosures reduce the income promoted women lose through all coworkers’ choices. The study evaluates information disclosure as a complement to gender quotas, contributing to understanding how affirmative action can counter self-reinforcing gender inequality in career advancement despite the risk of backlash.