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Field
Intervention (Hidden)
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Before
Recent literature has shown that if individuals become aware of their stereotypes, they change their behavior. We want to study whether managerial implicit gender bias lead to discriminating behaviour towards women. Moreover, we want to study whether making managers aware of their implicit bias induce them to change their behaviour when evaluating CVs. Through the new approach proposed by Kessler et al. (2019), we exploit the Incentivized Resume Rating to elicit managers preferences in terms of characteristics needed to become a promising manager. We deliver a survey to a large sample of managers, who are asked to evaluate explicitly fake CVs, constructed on the basis of real CVs of Bocconi SDA’s master students. Managers who will respond to our survey will hence be aware that the CV they are going to evaluate are fake (but still realistic): this prevent our study from any type of deception. The experiment is made of three steps. In the first step we will deliver a first survey in which we will ask managers to provide demographic characteristics, to express their beliefs and attitutes toward gender-related topics, to provide information of their firm’s performance and to complete the IAT test Gender-Career, with which we will assess their implicit gender bias. We will then divide the sample of managers into two groups, treatment and control. In the second step of our experiment we will communicate to the traeatment group of managers their IAT score. In the third step we will deliver to both treatment and control group the Incentivized Resume Rating, randomizing the timing of delivery in order to study whether the effect of the revelation of the IAT are persistent over time. We expect managers informed of their stereotypes before the IRR to provide higher scores to profiles of women.
We are collaborating with Federmanager, the biggest Association of managers in Italy. We will deliver the survey through Federmanager’s channels.
In particular, Federmanager has access to email addresses of its subscribers. To ensure data privacy, Bocconi researcher will be creating unique Qualtrics survey links that will be provided to Federmanager. Federmanager will send these links to their subscribers. Bocconi researcher will hence not be able to match answers to email addresses or names of respondents, as these will not be provided to Bocconi researchers. Federmanager, on the other hand, will receive only aggregate results of the survey answers. This is done to ensure complete anoymity of managers responding to the survey.
The procedure is the following:
1. Bocconi researcher create N unique links associated to N identifying numbers
2. Federmanager will receive these links with the associated identifying number and will match them with individual subscribers and send the survey.
3. Only a small fraction n of N will respond to the survey.
4. Bocconi researcher will receive the n answer to the survey, with their associated link. Bocconi researchers will hence have a dataset of answers associated to the n remaining identifying numbers.
5. Bocconi researcher will be able to stratify the sample of n respondents into treatment and control group.
6. Bocconi researcher will create other survey links and will associate them to those same n numbers for the second and third steps of the experiment (respectively the communication of the IAT score and the survey containing the IRR).
7. Federmanager will match again those new links associated to the n identifying numbers to the email addresses of point 2 and send the new links.
Our other partner is the Bocconi SDA Executive Master. Students from the Executive master will be asked to provide their anonymous CV so that we will be able to construct the fake profiles that will be delivered to managers for evaluation. Bocconi researcher will hence not be provided any information on personal data of students who are willing to take part to the project, such as name or day of birth.
The previous passage is extremely important for our incentive strategy
In particular, the Incentivized Resume Rating establish that respondent are aware of the fake nature of the CV they are evaluating, in order to avoid deception. However, these CVs have to be realistic in order to provide the right incentive to managers to respond with attention. In particular, we will ask managers whether they want to receive in the future real CVs of students that mostly resembles the profiles they scored the highest during the Incentive Resume Rating. After the experiment, we will ask Bocconi SDA Executive Master students whether they want to provide their CVs to be sent to those managers that would probably like their profile.
As already stated, all correspondence with the managers will be done through Federmanager, which will be provided the unique Qualtrics links through which we deliver all survey steps and communication to managers.
So, in case managers are willing to receive real CVs in the future and students are willing to provide their CVs to be sent to managers, we will be sending CVs through the same procedure as above described.
Another source of incentive to managers will be given by telling them that their profile evaluation will help the SDA Executive Master program to identify the most promising “managers of the future” among the students. We will provide to the Executive Master Program the characteristics preferred by managers, and students will be selected by the Master Program itself for participating in a meeting organized jointly by Bocconi SDA and Federmanager for presenting the association to students who will likely become managers in the future.
The experiment consists in administering a survey to Italian managers, including an Implicit Association Test to capture the implicit stereotypes that associate women and family against men and career. The survey is conducted from personal computers and will be accessible through unique links that managers will receive directly by email. Managers who agree to take part in the survey give written informed consent by confirming their intent to participate at the beginning of the survey. The time to complete the survey is around 30 minutes, and participants do not receive any compensation.
As already stated, the intervention aims at making managers aware of their implicit bias by revealing the score of their IAT test. Please find in the attachments the text of the communication they will receive.
We will ask to all the sample of managers whether they want to receive feedback on the IAT score after taking the test.
To the treatment group, the score will be communicated before the second survey containing the Incentivized Resume Rating. To the control group, the score will be communicated straight after.
The feedback will provided over e-mail (treatment group managers will receive a new unique Qualtrics link which will display their own IAT score). Together with the IAT score, it will also be provided a brief description of the test explaining whether in their case the association between women and family (or men and career) is “slight”, “moderate” or “strong” ased on the thresholds typically used in the literature (Greenwald et al., 2009). They will also be reassured that these results would not be shared with anyone.
The incentivized resume rating will be sent through a second Qualtrics survey and will be delivered one or three weeks after the disclosure of IAT score to the treatment group.
To see the text of the first and the second survey, please check the attachments. The attachments also include the messages that managers receive for the presentation of both surveys and the text of the message sent to reveal the IAT score.
We will also provide another, independent, treatment, in which we will provide to a second treatment group an informative treatment in which we provide explanations of how the labour market is affected by the gender gap and how managerial gender bias can affect decisions: this is a cost effective treatment, and will be useful to compare other ways to debias managers with our preferred treatment of revealing stereotypes.
As explained, the experiment is done on two differente populations to increase our sample: the first is the one of Federmanager, the second is the one of a high tech company, Leonardo S.p.A.
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After
Recent literature has shown that if individuals become aware of their stereotypes, they change their behavior. We want to study whether managerial implicit gender bias lead to discriminating behaviour towards women. Moreover, we want to study whether making managers aware of their implicit bias induce them to change their behaviour when evaluating CVs. Through the new approach proposed by Kessler et al. (2019), we exploit the Incentivized Resume Rating to elicit managers preferences in terms of characteristics needed to become a promising manager. We deliver a survey to a large sample of managers, who are asked to evaluate explicitly fake CVs, constructed on the basis of real CVs of Bocconi SDA’s master students. Managers who will respond to our survey will hence be aware that the CV they are going to evaluate are fake (but still realistic): this prevent our study from any type of deception. The experiment is made of three steps. In the first step we will deliver a first survey in which we will ask managers to provide demographic characteristics, to express their beliefs and attitutes toward gender-related topics, to provide information of their firm’s performance and to complete the IAT test Gender-Career, with which we will assess their implicit gender bias. We will then divide the sample of managers into two groups, treatment and control. In the second step of our experiment we will communicate to the traeatment group of managers their IAT score. In the third step we will deliver to both treatment and control group the Incentivized Resume Rating, randomizing the timing of delivery in order to study whether the effect of the revelation of the IAT are persistent over time. We expect managers informed of their stereotypes before the IRR to provide higher scores to profiles of women.
We are collaborating with Federmanager, the biggest Association of managers in Italy. We will deliver the survey through Federmanager’s channels.
In particular, Federmanager has access to email addresses of its subscribers. To ensure data privacy, Bocconi researcher will be creating unique Qualtrics survey links that will be provided to Federmanager. Federmanager will send these links to their subscribers. Bocconi researcher will hence not be able to match answers to email addresses or names of respondents, as these will not be provided to Bocconi researchers. Federmanager, on the other hand, will receive only aggregate results of the survey answers. This is done to ensure complete anoymity of managers responding to the survey.
The procedure is the following:
1. Bocconi researcher create N unique links associated to N identifying numbers
2. Federmanager will receive these links with the associated identifying number and will match them with individual subscribers and send the survey.
3. Only a small fraction n of N will respond to the survey.
4. Bocconi researcher will receive the n answer to the survey, with their associated link. Bocconi researchers will hence have a dataset of answers associated to the n remaining identifying numbers.
5. Bocconi researcher will be able to stratify the sample of n respondents into treatment and control group.
6. Bocconi researcher will create other survey links and will associate them to those same n numbers for the second and third steps of the experiment (respectively the communication of the IAT score and the survey containing the IRR).
7. Federmanager will match again those new links associated to the n identifying numbers to the email addresses of point 2 and send the new links.
Our other partner is the Bocconi SDA Executive Master. Students from the Executive master will be asked to provide their anonymous CV so that we will be able to construct the fake profiles that will be delivered to managers for evaluation. Bocconi researcher will hence not be provided any information on personal data of students who are willing to take part to the project, such as name or day of birth.
The previous passage is extremely important for our incentive strategy
In particular, the Incentivized Resume Rating establish that respondent are aware of the fake nature of the CV they are evaluating, in order to avoid deception. However, these CVs have to be realistic in order to provide the right incentive to managers to respond with attention. In particular, we will ask managers whether they want to receive in the future real CVs of students that mostly resembles the profiles they scored the highest during the Incentive Resume Rating. After the experiment, we will ask Bocconi SDA Executive Master students whether they want to provide their CVs to be sent to those managers that would probably like their profile.
As already stated, all correspondence with the managers will be done through Federmanager, which will be provided the unique Qualtrics links through which we deliver all survey steps and communication to managers.
So, in case managers are willing to receive real CVs in the future and students are willing to provide their CVs to be sent to managers, we will be sending CVs through the same procedure as above described.
Another source of incentive to managers will be given by telling them that their profile evaluation will help the SDA Executive Master program to identify the most promising “managers of the future” among the students. We will provide to the Executive Master Program the characteristics preferred by managers, and students will be selected by the Master Program itself for participating in a meeting organized jointly by Bocconi SDA and Federmanager for presenting the association to students who will likely become managers in the future.
The experiment consists in administering a survey to Italian managers, including an Implicit Association Test to capture the implicit stereotypes that associate women and family against men and career. The survey is conducted from personal computers and will be accessible through unique links that managers will receive directly by email. Managers who agree to take part in the survey give written informed consent by confirming their intent to participate at the beginning of the survey. The time to complete the survey is around 30 minutes, and participants do not receive any compensation.
As already stated, the intervention aims at making managers aware of their implicit bias by revealing the score of their IAT test. Please find in the attachments the text of the communication they will receive.
We will ask to all the sample of managers whether they want to receive feedback on the IAT score after taking the test.
To the treatment group, the score will be communicated before the second survey containing the Incentivized Resume Rating. To the control group, the score will be communicated straight after.
The feedback will provided over e-mail (treatment group managers will receive a new unique Qualtrics link which will display their own IAT score). Together with the IAT score, it will also be provided a brief description of the test explaining whether in their case the association between women and family (or men and career) is “slight”, “moderate” or “strong” ased on the thresholds typically used in the literature (Greenwald et al., 2009). They will also be reassured that these results would not be shared with anyone.
The incentivized resume rating will be sent through a second Qualtrics survey and will be delivered one or three weeks after the disclosure of IAT score to the treatment group.
To see the text of the first and the second survey, please check the attachments. The attachments also include the messages that managers receive for the presentation of both surveys and the text of the message sent to reveal the IAT score.
We will also provide another, independent, treatment, in which we will provide to a second treatment group an informative treatment in which we provide explanations of how the labour market is affected by the gender gap and how managerial gender bias can affect decisions: this is a cost effective treatment, and will be useful to compare other ways to debias managers with our preferred treatment of revealing stereotypes.
As explained, the experiment is done on two differente populations to increase our sample: the first is the one of Federmanager, the second is the one of a high tech company, Leonardo S.p.A.
With Leonardo S.p.A. the procedure is easier. A Qualtrics link contaning the first survey is sent directly to each employee of the company by the HR team. At the end of the first survey, respondents are asked whether they want to leave their email address to be contacted again in order to receive their IAT score.
After one week from the end of the first survey, all Leonardo S.p.A.'s respondents who left their email would be recontacted. They will be given the possibility to either receive their IAT score or to also participate in a second survey entailing the evaluation of 10 CVs following the methodology of IRR. The treatment group would receive the IAT score before starting the evaluation, the control group would receive the IAT at the end of the CVs evaluation. What we have been calling the Placebo group, instead, would receive the information about the gender gap in the labor market before starting the CV evaluation.
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Field
Secondary Outcomes (End Points)
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Before
The other outcomes will be given by the IAT score itself, which will be regressed on manager’s individual characteristics.
We will also use firm’s performance variables and the share of women in the firm and in managerial positions as outcome variables, and study whether manager’s bias affect these figures.
Evetually, we also use explicit attitudes and belilefs of managers on the IAT score, showing whether correlation arises between explicit and implicit attitudes. This is ex ante ambiguous and the prior is that the explanatory power of the IAT score in explaining explicit bias is low. This might be due both to Social Desirability Bias, for which managers provide answers that are more acceptable, but also to the fact that managers are trained in answering these type of questions in a non discriminatory way (thanks for example to diversity training they have undertaken during their career).
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After
The other outcomes will be given by the IAT score itself, which will be regressed on manager’s individual characteristics.
We will also use firm’s performance variables and the share of women in the firm and in managerial positions as outcome variables, and study whether manager’s bias affect these figures.
Evetually, we also use explicit attitudes and belilefs of managers on the IAT score, showing whether correlation arises between explicit and implicit attitudes. This is ex ante ambiguous and the prior is that the explanatory power of the IAT score in explaining explicit bias is low. This might be due both to Social Desirability Bias, for which managers provide answers that are more acceptable, but also to the fact that managers are trained in answering these type of questions in a non discriminatory way (thanks for example to diversity training they have undertaken during their career).
An additional secondary outcome is the time spent on CVs. This can be recorded through Qualtrics.
In order to incentivize the participation in the second survey, we would also provide the possibility to win a 200 euros prize for those who would finish the resume rating. At the end of the resume rating, we ask both treatment and control group to state how much of these 200 euros, in case of win, they would donate to an association promoting women empowerment in the labor market. This is an incentivized outcome as well and might be interesting if our treatment has any effect on this.
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