Anticipated Discrimination and Gender Stereotypes in Job Applications - Experiment 2

We study to what extent including evaluator subjectivity in tournament decisions affects the documented gender gap in competition. We conduct a large-scale, pre-registered online experiment ($n=7310$) in which workers choose between a non-competitive piece rate and a competitive payment scheme whose payout depends on being selected by an incentivised human evaluator. By randomly varying whether the evaluator can observe the worker's gender across a male-stereotyped and a non-stereotyped task, we exogenously induce the scope for anticipated discrimination. In the male-stereotyped task, gender revelation breaks the link between women's objective performance beliefs and their beliefs about being selected: conditional on the subjective probability of having the best signal, moderately confident women report significantly lower selection expectations when their gender is known. This distortion reduces female entry rates, with the strongest effects among non-risk averse participants: those who made up the majority of the competitor pool when their gender was concealed. The revelation of gender in the male-stereotyped domain particularly effects low-ability women, destabilising the negative association between ability and competition among females. We validate that this effect is driven by the anticipation of gender discrimination and not by a preference for opting out of settings in which gender is made salient: in a non-stereotyped task we find no change in beliefs nor in competition behaviour when their gender is revealed to the evaluator. Our findings suggest that the extent to which the gender competition gap distorts female labour supply may be underestimated in the face of the potential for evaluator bias, even before it is enacted.