Whowill lead? Evidence on leadership exposure and the gender gap in aspirations

There is limited prior evidence on how to close the gender gap in leadership aspirations, which emerges already in adolescence (Alan et al. 2020), persists among university graduates and entry-level employees, and deepens further over careers (Azmat et al., 2025; Haegele, 2024).

This motivates our research question and intervention. The question we try to answer is: Can individual leadership aspirations be exogenously stimulated by randomly assigning individuals to a leadership role on a team that has to solve an abstract collaborative task requiring both communication and decision-making. The channel through which this random leadership experience may stimulate willingness to lead is through making own leadership preferences and ability salient to the randomly selected individual, as well as emphasizing typical elements of a leadership role, namely a specific title, certain responsibilities, some private information, and economic incentives.

While leadership tasks in the workplace are typically not randomly assigned, but are rather a strong signal and predictor of future promotions (Bircan et al, 2024), we investigate if these leadership experiences in and of themselves stimulate individuals' willingness to take on leadership roles. We hypothesize that such leadership experiences may be particularly relevant to groups of employees who are underrepresented among managers, and as such have fewer role models, leading to uncertainty and lower confidence in own fit and skills to lead.

Specifically, we conduct an RCT on university students, a large share of which business students, expecting to work in private sector companies after graduation. The RCT is framed as a training session on teamwork and collaboration, centered around playing two rounds of a newly developed multiplayer online game in groups of four at the experimental lab of University of Copenhagen.