Job Market Paper
Peer and Systematic Gender Biases (Link to Draft)
Gender stereotypes play a crucial role in shaping societal perceptions of individual abilities, often leading to inaccurate beliefs that influence important career and academic decisions. This study investigates whether exposure to peer gender discrimination affects individual preferences for working in environments where strong gender stereotypes prevail. Using a three-part lab experiment conducted online with Prolific, this paper explores how awareness of peer gender biases influences task selection in gender stereotyped tasks differently from systematic gender biases. I find that information about systematic biases decreases the probability of women participating in male oriented tasks by 8 percentage points, but peer biases do not have a different effect. Additionally men are not responsive to this either the systematic or the peer bias information.
Working Papers
Navigating Business Interactions: Female Entrepreneurs’ Preferences over Gender, Timing, and Harassment (Link to Draft)
with Shanthi Manian and Ketki Sheth
This paper examines an underexplored determinant of women’s business performance: preferences female entrepreneurs hold over the types of customers and suppliers they want to engage with and the environments they seek to avoid. Using discrete choice experiments with 903 female entrepreneurs in Addis Ababa, we find women are willing to forego profits to work with other women, meet during the day, and avoid counterparts known for harassing behavior. Survey data confirm the prevalence of harassment and associated behavioral adjustments. These preferences cannot be explained by productivity expectations and underscore the importance of addressing social and safety constraints in female entrepreneurship.
From Streets to Shelter: Understanding Attribute-Based Decisions in Shelter
with Stephanie Pierce, Jamie McCasland, and Amy Weiss
In this paper we examine which attributes of homeless shelters increase or decrease the likelihood that unhoused individuals will choose shelter over remaining on the street. Using a field experiment in the Bay Area of California, we find that a majority of unhoused individuals express a strong desire to leave the streets (92% report wanting to be housed within a year). However particular shelter attributes increase resistance to uptake of shelter. Policies that restrict freedoms such as having drug testing or curfews significantly decrease willingness to accept shelter, as well as having to share a room. These findings provide evidence for particular institutional designs could help to reduce shelter resistance.