Séminaire Microéconomie : Tous les mercredis
Heure : 11h00 – 12h15
Date : 21/12/2022

Zoom

Clémentine VAN EFFENTERRE (U of Toronto) – “Does Better Information Reduce Gender Discrimination in the Technology Industry?

Abstract : Does information provision mitigate gender biases in how individuals are assessed in interviews? We investigate this question looking at a high-skilled online labor market in the technology industry where women are particularly underrepresented. Leveraging over 60,000 trial mock interviews from an online peer-to-peer platform for software engineers, we first document that women receive lower subjective coding ratings on the platform than men. In 2017, the platform intro- duced a new automated code evaluation device, which allowed interviewers to learn about interviewees’ objective coding performance in real time, and use this as input in their final subjective evaluations. We exploit the fact that the device was progressively made available for pairs of users chosen at random, and provide evidence that this objective measure of performance does not reduce the raw gender gap in peers’ subjective ratings. Additionally, we find that for the same level of objective performance, women are evaluated more harshly than men. Our results are not explained by changes in the composition of users on the platform, endogenous matching between users and coding problems, selection or gender differences in performance. To explore mechanisms behind the residual gap in ratings, we run a follow-up online experiment to directly assess whether software developers evaluate a piece of code differently if they know the gender of the coder (in progress). Using a large set of de-identified code blocks written by men and women, we investigate whether residual gender gaps in subjective ratings are due to unmeasured differences in code quality, or gender bias.

Joint with : A. Craig

Organisateurs :
Julien COMBE (Pôle d’Economie du CREST)
​​Roland RATHELOT  (Pôle d’Economie du CREST)

Sponsors:
CREST