Gender Norms, the Dating Market, and Job Search: A Second Experiment

2016-11-08

2016-11-10

The questionnaire asks students to make three choices over hypothetical jobs.

Question 1:
Job A: A job with a high salary that requires 55-60 hours of work per week.
Job B: A job with a lower salary that requires 45-50 hours of work per week.

Question 2:
Job A. The work has a positive social impact, but you would not interact often with co-workers.
Job B. The job has a collegial and collaborative work impact, but the work does not have a social impact.

Question 3:
Job A. The job provides the opportunity of rapid promotion to partner, but requires constant travel.
Job B. The job has no travel, but promotion to partner level is slower and less certain.

Question 2 does not allow us to test our hypothesis; we have no predictions over the results of this question. However, in Questions 1 and 3, choosing Job A would provide a positive signal to the labor market, while Job B would provide a positive signal to the marriage market (for women). We expect single women's answers to be tailored to the marriage market more when their male classmates can see their answers than when their female classmates can. Thus, we expect in Questions 1 and 3, single women to choose job A more when they are placed in a group with women then when they are placed in a group with men.

Because we have limited power, our analysis focuses on the responses of single women. The vast majority of non-single women will be placed into all-female groups. However, we can compare the rates at which single and non-single women choose Job A in Questions 1 and 3 in all-female groups. If single women only respond to marriage market concerns when placed in a group with men, we expect the rates of choosing Job A to be similar among single and non-single women in all-female groups.

In their career class, first-year MBA students will be asked to fill out a questionnaire during their small group work. The questionnaire will ask them to choose which of two hypothetical jobs they would prefer in three different comparisons. Students are told that if there is time at the end of class, the answers will be discussed in their small groups with the instructor. Thus, students will know that both the career office and their small group-mates may be able to see their answer. What is different between the "treatment" and "control" groups is who those group-mates are. Because we have limited power and our previous work has shown that only single women are responsive to their actions being made public to peers, we focus on single women.

Some single women will be in groups with only other women while others will be in groups with only men. We will compare the choices of single women in groups with women and single women in groups with men.

Randomization in office by computer

Individuals are randomized into groups; the treatment is the gender of the peers. Single women with male peers are the only female in their group. Single women with female peers may have other single women in their group.

Yes

42 clusters

59 individuals

30 individuals (13 clusters) with female peers
29 individuals (29 clusters) with male peers