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the first line result is that men and women performed equally well on average in fact if you look across all of our
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subjects women performed maybe a half a question better but the men rated themselves much more favorably on all of
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these scales and so on the zero to 100 scale men gave themselves ratings over 25 percent higher than the ratings that
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women gave themselves welcome to the ripple effect the podcast that takes you on a journey through the minds of work
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and faculty I'm your host Dan Loney and in each episode we'll be diving deep
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into the inspiration behind the groundbreaking research that Wharton professors have conducted and exploring
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how their findings resonate with the world today we'll be covering a diverse
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range of topics bringing you the latest insights and knowledge that you can apply to your life into work so get
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ready to dive into new ideas with the ripple effect so Judd the annual performance review is
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a thing thing that a lot of people dread what was it that led you to study this topic in the first place
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yeah we were very interested in a question that economists in particular had not really studied that much which
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is how do people subjectively describe their performance it's one thing to answer a question like how how many uh
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units did you sell this year or how many new clients did you sign on but a lot of
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communication about performance and ability so even before you join a job maybe you're asked about how good you
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are at something a lot of the communication around that is subjective you there's no right answer you have to
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describe something that's kind of hard to pin down and economists had not really looked at that but we think that
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it's something that's quite important in the way people perceive you and so we
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wanted to really look at that style of question being asked something subjective about ability or performance
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and apparently your research showed to a degree that women systematically rate themselves lower than men on work
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performance even when their work may be viewed as being objectively better can you account for the difference there
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so this was one of the things that motivated us two subjective questions and the way people answered them because
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we had this hypothesis that not only is this important and understudied but it's
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something that we might see a gender gap where men conditional on the same performance men would describe that
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performance more favorably so my co-author on this work is Christine Exley at Harvard Business School and you
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know she and I wrote this paper and if you asked us about the same paper I might say oh it's phenomenal and she
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might say oh you know it's pretty good and that difference of the way that we
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talk about the work even though it's the same underlying project that we're both
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a part of that was the kind of dynamic that we thought might be interesting to explore
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so when you talk about the office are there subtle ways that that this might show up more so than not
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so we were interested not just in the performance reviews that you know you might get asked once a year where the
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employer will sit you down and kind of work through a set of questions we were also interested in the kinds of more
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commonplace and often sometimes subtle interactions that you have with your colleagues and with your supervisors
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where you're just talking about work and and people are getting an impression of
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how well you do your job and whether you might be able to take on more difficult
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challenges and if men systematically talk about their prior performance and their underlying ability in more
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positive terms that might change the way that people perceive them relative to their equally capable female female
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colleagues and so that was uh the kind of what pushed us a little bit more towards these more subjective questions
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and the ways in which people typically communicate that is you know with adjectives or uh we we still we're
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economists who wanted to study this we still had quantitative questions so we asked things like how much would you
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agree with the statement I performed well on a zero to 100 scale so we can still get a quantitative measure but
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it's clearly a subjective of question that doesn't have a correct answer
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is the potential impact for women having this difference at times noticeable yeah so it's a little tricky because
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what we don't want to do is say that women should necessarily self-promote more that that they should necessarily
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talk more favorably about their own performance they are in a situation where it's possible that there will be
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backlash and perhaps differential backlash uh for speaking too positively about their own ability and performance
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it's possible that the gender difference that we observe is in fact a response to
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kind of social training that people go through where when they do talk favorably about how well they did you
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know that they might be met with kind of harsher uh responses and so they've kind
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of learned not to not to push it on those adjectives so the study that we did which I'm excited to tell you more
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about took away the possibility for backlash so the there wasn't anyone who was going to respond to what the S the
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subjects in our study said uh in uh necessarily a negative way in fact they didn't even know if there was anyone
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responding they didn't know the gender of the person um but it doesn't mean that those same
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forces weren't influencing the way that men and women talked about how well they
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did so the advice is not to the women or the men about how they talk about themselves any takeaways from the
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research have to be on how we elicit information about people's uh performance and ability and and
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potentially not relying so much on the way people talk about themselves all right so take us through the
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research a little bit and what you were able to decipher yeah so this uh this was a project I was
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really excited to be a part of and it uh ended up with a lot of parts but the first thing we we did was we had our
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study subjects uh so there were about 4 000 of them who were recruited from an online labor market platform uh and then
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I'll tell you about some youth that we uh did a similar version of the study
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with uh I'll tell you about that later but the uh 4 000 folks the first thing
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they did was they took a math and science test so 20 Questions taken from the armed services vocational aptitude
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battery test which is a test that is used by folks like me as measure of cognitive ability but the questions we
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picked were were math and science questions the subjects took that test and then we
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asked them you know how well did you think you did on the kind of normal out of 20 questions you know tell me the
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number that you think you got correct and that's something that economists have looked at for a while uh sort of
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just we call it we think of it as confidence of how how many questions you you got correct then we asked our
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subjective question so describing the performance on the test with an adjective that range from very poor to
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exceptional and also these questions on the zero to 100 scale of agreement with statements like I performed well on the
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test I took what we found was that this the first line result is that men and women
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performed equally well on average in fact if you look across all of our subjects women performed maybe a half a
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question better but the men rated themselves much more favorably on all of these scales and so on the zero to 100
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scale men gave themselves ratings over 25 percent higher than the ratings that women gave themselves
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so the first hypothesis that we had was maybe this is just uh confidence just remanifesting so we looked at that
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question of how uh how many of the 20 questions that you got asked did you get correct and sure enough even though men
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and women on average each got about 10 questions correct men said they got 11 correct and women
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said they got eight correct so there was clear clear evidence that men and women
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had different perceptions of their underlying ability and we wondered whether that was what was causing the
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gender gap in self-promotion so what we did then was we told men and women after
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they took the test we told them exactly how many questions I got correct so now we're comparing men and women say who
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each answer 10 questions correctly and have been told that they answer 10 questions correctly and we asked the
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same questions about uh you know stating agreement with I performed well on the test and even
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with the same performance and knowing they have the same performance there was still a very large gender gap so the
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gender gap shrinks a little bit when you give performance information but it but
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just a little bit it's still quite big and so that told us there's something
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Beyond just the not being sure how many questions I got correct there's something fundamentally different about
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the way men and women interpret the same underlying score but the challenge I think in terms of
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giving that self-review that self-evaluation that I think in many cases is probably a very unique element
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for people to have to do in general whether they be men or women so this was uh one of the kind of
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hypotheses that we had and we wanted to push the result that I just described a little bit further so we did a few
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different things one thing we did was we told men and women the average self-evaluations of other people who had
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scored the same as them so now the men and women both know they answer 10 questions correctly and are now both
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told what the average self-evaluation is of folks who get 10 questions correct still we see the gender gap it's
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unchanged from that so we had another hypothesis which is maybe women just have higher standards than men maybe you
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know it it's just the case that if you ask a woman how a certain score is that
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they just kind of always think that it's it's less good than than a man would so
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to get at this we did two things uh both I think are informative one thing we did
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was we asked people not to describe their own performance but we asked them to describe somebody else's performance
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so now you've taken the test you you don't know that you've answered 10
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questions correct but we're gonna look at folks say who men and women who both
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answer 10 questions correctly and we're going to ask them to describe the performance of somebody else who
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answered 10 questions correctly so it's their performance they don't know it's
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their performance but now it's not about themselves it's about somebody else
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when we do that we see no gender gap so when describing a third party men and women have the same at use the same
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adjectives for the same score it's only when they're talking about their own performance that men and women
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differ the other thing we did was and this is based on Research from economics in
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other fields suggesting that gender gaps are related to the kind of stereotypes surrounding the task so
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the unfortunate stereotype around Math and Science tasks is that they're kind
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of more male we call a male type that men are expected to do better than women even though in our case of course women
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do do better than men but we picked a task that is less male type that's kind of more neutral and if
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anything uh folks think that women might outperform men and that was a verbal task so same kind of setup but instead
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of doing a test with 20 math and science questions uh the subjects are doing a test with verbal questions
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and when we do that we again see no gender gap in the way that men and women talk about their performance when the
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performance is equally good so the thing that's happening here is that there's
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something unique about this kind of math and science domain where the stereotype
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is that men do better where in that domain only women are saying that they do less well even
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knowing that they have you know a particular performance and that that performance is the same as a man who
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says they did great so going back to what you said a couple of moments ago I think it brings up the topic of
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self-promotion and how we think about how we are answering questions and how we view our perception of how we're
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doing in comparison to what we believe our colleagues may be doing as well and I'm wondering if there is a
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potential concern of whether or not there can be too much self-promotion for either men or women
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yeah so it's hard to get at this because I mean there certainly could be and
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that's uh earlier when I was talking about backlash that um you know maybe women don't say that
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they're phenomenal in math and science because they're worried uh that doesn't fit stereotypes of women
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and people will kind of react negatively to them saying that they're uh that
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they're very good at this and in fact there is a lot of evidence of backlash
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uh for actions that are not that don't fit stereotypes that could you know could be playing out here as well so
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there's certainly that element I think you know it's not obvious without more research about
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exactly where the line is for kind of what the what's the appropriate amount
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of uh positivity to have about you you know how much can you uh maybe over inflate
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your your own sense of self I will say one other thing one other kind of studies that we did uh to kind of start
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to think about this we in much of what I've described the person who is answering the questions
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about how well they did these subjective questions we told them that their uh performed that sorry there's their
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answer to the self-promotion questions these subjective questions would be given to another study subject who would
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use that answer and only that answer so they wouldn't learn about how well the
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person actually performed they would use the self-promotion answer to decide whether to hire the person and how much
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to pay them so that's where the self-promotion kind of language comes from because this is
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an answer to a question that could be used to determine your your pay from the study well and that was going to be part
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of my question next because I think you also have to look at this from the employer's perspective and how they
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understand these differences in the process of hiring and promotion through a company
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yeah so that's uh one of the things that I found interesting about the the different versions that we did because
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when the uh studies subjects knew that the employer would see the self-evaluation that they gave about
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their own performance uh they rated themselves more favorably so they did respond to the fact that there was an
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incentive uh to to say that they did well but when we took the employer incentive away
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we still saw a big gender gap so men and women both of them were kind of inflating how they described themselves
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in the presence of an employer when the employer was removed so when they're
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just describing themselves to us the experimenter they still they both come down and level
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but they're still a massive Gap so this to me says for the employer perspective
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it's not about exactly the way that you incentivize the self-promotion questions
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that's going to matter it's not like you can say oh we're asking these questions
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but you know we promise not to use them to determine bonus or you know we're
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only going to use them in certain ways it's not gonna removing the incentives
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to promote is not necessarily going to change the gender gap which was there even absent
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the the employer at all it really is something about the way that people describe their
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their ability and performance even when you know it's not being used for anything it's just yeah they they're
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just saying it to us the researcher so can you theorize what might be the way for women to be able to close that
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gender gap a little bit so our takeaway is that well it's twofold one we think it's not the
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responsibility of the women it shouldn't be the responsibility of the women to
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change the way that they act for multiple reasons one it's it's unfair to
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put it on them two it's not clear that we know how to help people change the
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way they think about their own ability and performance oh one result I didn't
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tell you that speaks to that is the study on youth so uh we did a study with 10 000 middle and high school students
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where we had them do essentially the same thing except we did it without employers and we did it with uh shorter
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math and science tests and we saw gender gaps in the way that people talked about
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their ability and performance in every grade that we looked at from uh as young as sixth grade all the way up to
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um to to seniors and that was pretty uh pretty clear evidence to us that this was not something saying that you know
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was was coming at a particular point in time this was something that uh you know
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seemed to be throughout at least Middle School and High School uh this pattern um so if there is intervention to be
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done it might need to happen before sixth grade um so that's the second thing is that it's
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not clear how we would change the way people perceive their own ability and performance and then third is the thing
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I've mentioned already which is the potential for backlash so it's not clear
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that we want to encourage women to promote more because that could uh you know that could it could be optimizing
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given the incentives that they face what that means then is that it pushes the the the kind of fixing the problem
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back to the employers who at interview stages uh at application stages at the performance review stages
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you know we would argue should rely Less on these subjective self-evaluations and
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should rely more on objective measures to the extent that they exist in assessing ability and performance
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so where do you think the next step in this research is where do you want to take this next
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yeah so uh we are starting to think more about how the social dynamics of say the workplace or in educational
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institutions how that interacts with the gender gap so one thing that we started
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to look at in our research was whether people perceive the gender gap so whether I anticipate that women are
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going to talk less favorably about their own ability and performance and it does not look like the study
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subjects who are participating so the people who are giving us the answers that display the Gap they don't appear
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to anticipate that the Gap is there so that doesn't answer a key question which
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is do employers who are doing the hiring and promotion and deciding on bonuses whether they've kind of learned over
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time that uh that women kind of talk differently about their performance it's
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possible that good employers have recognized that if they ask this question they get the the gender gap and
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and maybe they even correct for it to a certain extent but but that I think is the next line of work to figure out
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is that observation there and are the corrections actually being made when they need to be
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Judd great to have you with us today thanks very much for your time it's great to be here thanks so much
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thank you for listening to the ripple effect we hope you found this episode informative and engaging don't forget to
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