Affirmative Action Policies Promote Women and Do Not Harm Efficiency in the Laboratory

Loukas Balafoutas · Matthias Sutter

280 citations0/0 files storedScience

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies Gender Diversity and Inequality Gender Politics and Representation

Abstract

Girl Power The potential of affirmative action policies to reduce overall outcomes because of lower individual performance has been discussed widely and at length. But do quotas or preferential treatment of applicants alter the pool of candidates? Balafoutas and Sutter (p. 579 ; see the Perspective by Villeval ) used an existing laboratory-based task to assess the change in composition of winning candidates and the overall outcome as a function of three affirmative action policies. Policies designed to encourage more women to enter a competitive environment served to recruit enough high-performing individuals to ensure that the efficiency in performing the task was preserved. Beaman et al. (p. 582 , published online 12 January) examined the effects of a constitutionally mandated reservation of village-council and council-leader positions for women in West Bengal after two election cycles (1998 and 2003). The program appeared to narrow the gender gap in aspirations of parents for their children and of children for themselves; in addition, teenage girls spent more time in school and less on household chores. Beliefs and attitudes changed only after the second set of elections—that is, after a longer exposure to female role models—complementing the more rapid policy changes instituted by women council leaders after the first round of elections.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 280 citations exist upstream.

References

2009Gender Differences in Preferences 2007Do Women Shy Away From Competition? Do Men Compete Too Much?2003Performance in Competitive Environments: Gender Differences 2000Orchestrating Impartiality: The Impact of “Blind” Auditions on Female Musicians 2009Lab Experiments Are a Major Source of Knowledge in the Social Sciences 1999Chapter 48 Race and gender in the labor market 1987The Economics of Women, Men, and Work.2009Gender Differences in Competition: Evidence\\ From a Matrilineal and a Patriarchal Society

Cited by

2010Explaining the Gender Gap in Math Test Scores: The Role of Competition 2018Racism, African American Women, and Their Sexual and Reproductive Health: A Review of Historical and Contemporary Evidence and Implications for Health Equity 2015Preferences and Biases in Educational Choices and Labour Market Expectations: Shrinking the Black Box of Gender 2014Gender Differences in Subjective Well-Being and Their Relationships with Gender Equality 2017A Multi-Level Process Model for Understanding Diversity Practice Effectiveness

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.