briq Newsroom

gender

Michela Carlana on stereotypes and biased behavior

In her first lecture as part of the briq short lecture series, Michela Carlana (Harvard Kennedy School) presented her work on the effect of teacher stereotypes on student outcomes. She focused in particular on gender stereotypes providing evidence from the Italian context. Her work shows that teachers’ gender stereotypes have a negative effect on girls’ performance and self-confidence in own math abilities. Furthermore, stereotypes induce girls to underperform in math and self-select into less demanding high schools, following the track recommendation of their teachers.

Which kind of public policies could be implemented to mitigate the negative effect of exposure to stereotypes? In the second lecture, Michela addressed this issue by analyzing two types of policies. First, she discussed potential debiasing intervention with teachers and parents, and she provided evidence from a recent working paper on the effect of revealing own stereotypes against immigrants to teachers. The study shows that increasing awareness of teachers on own stereotypes reduces bias in grading against immigrants.

Second, she analyzed interventions with students to mitigate constraints induced by stereotypes: for example, the project “Girls Code It Better” is aimed at decreasing the vulnerability of girls to the exposure of the belief that “women are inherently less fit for math and tech fields than men”. In the context of bias against immigrants, she provides evidence of the positive impact of a large-scale randomized control trial targeted at high-achieving students and aimed at tackling their educational segregation in vocational schools.

Paola Giuliano on the origins and persistence of gender roles

Paola Giuliano at briq, August 31, 2018

A recent strand of the economics literature tried to understand the origin of cultural norms and beliefs. Different studies have documented the continuity of cultural norms over remarkably long periods of time.

In her first of two lectures she recently gave at briq, Paola Giuliano (UCLA Anderson School of Management) reviewed work on the origin of differences in gender norms, with particular emphasis on differences in agricultural technologies. Look to history and you will find plenty of examples of farming communities where women worked as much as men. But in plough-intensive societies, where cultivation and planting relied on physical strength, men were the primary farmers. Today many of these societies still show the same division of labor.

Paola Giuliano reviewed her work which shows that at present the descendants of societies that traditionally practiced plough agriculture have lower rates of female participation in the workplace, in politics and in entrepreneurial activities, as well as greater prevalence of attitudes favoring gender inequality, and even a higher male-to-female sex ratio in every age group.

In the same lecture she more broadly reviewed the most recent empirical evidence on various historical determinants of contemporary difference in gender roles and how these differences are transmitted from parents to children and therefore persist until today. This included work on female labor force participation, fertility, education, marriage arrangements, competitive attitude and even domestic violence.

Although cultural beliefs can be quite persistent, there are also many examples of dramatic changes. This raises the natural question: When does culture change and does it persist? In particular, what determines a society’s willingness to adopt new customs and beliefs rather than hold on to traditions?

In her second lecture, Paola examined a determinant that has been put forth in the anthropology literature to answer this question: the variability of the environment from one generation to the next. She shows that populations with ancestors who lived in an environment with more stability from one generation to the next not only place a greater importance on maintaining tradition today, but they also exhibit more persistence in their traditions over time.