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Brown Bag (Lunch) Seminar: Underconfident Women Earn Less

The CEU Campus
Monday, February 11, 2019, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

Women systematically sort into different jobs than men, but isolating why they do is difficult in the field. We study job choices in a clean environment that allows us to focus on the role of beliefs about one’s own productivity for job sorting. Using a quasi-representative sample of the Danish population, we find that highly productive women are about twice as likely to be underconfident as similar men, and therefore sort into jobs that pay less. We match experimental choices with income data from official registers and find that women who are highly productive but underconfident in our experiment also earn less than their equally productive peers in the field.