Understanding Gender Discrimination by Managers
While we have extensive evidence on the prevalence of gender bias in hiring, promotions and wages, we know less about the mechanisms underlying this bias. This research conducts a large-scale field experiment with 3,600 employees in 250 schools.
This study investigates:
- how often managers observe a given employee and
- whether manager evaluations affect employee’s pay or are just used for feedback
The study finds that when there are no financial stakes associated with performance evaluations, there is no gender bias. This is true for using data from actual performance evaluations and for randomized vignettes varying the gender of the teacher. In contrast, when principals’ evaluations determine teachers’ end of year raise, we see that female teachers receive 10% lower raises, controlling for productivity. However, when principals are randomly assigned to conduct more frequent classroom observations of teachers, this lowers their evaluations of male teachers and results in gender parity in evaluation scores even under financial stakes.
Combined this suggests that improving the accuracy of manager information could close the gender gap in performance evaluations.
