What Do people Choose to Watch?

The goal of this project is to evaluate the impact of institutions promoting diversity in a controlled environment. The motivation for the study stems from concerns about diversity in academia, and specifically gender diversity, that appears particularly difficult to achieve. We conjecture that institutions promoting gender diversity may not promote diversity of ideas in a world where there are gender differences in taste and expertise for certain fields, leading to some fields being more appealing to men and others to women.
If there is an incentive to hire women, preference may be given to women, but possibly mostly those in male fields. As a consequence, institutions promoting gender diversity may achieve more gender diversity but not necessarily more diversity of ideas. We propose a novel experimental design to study what ideas people choose to get exposed to and that will help us evaluate how institutions that promote gender diversity or diversity of fields may affect gender and idea diversity.
Specifically, we propose an experimental set up in which an individual, which we call employer, has to choose one presentation to watch from a set of presentations. This presentation can be either be by a man or a woman and can either be in a female or a male field. We provide an incentive to choose a presentation of better quality, and also provide incentives to pay attention to the presentation itself.
The goal is to mimic hiring decisions in professional contexts, and academia in particular, where hiring someone has implications for exposure to their ideas.