Are men from Mars, and women from Venus? If so, policies that seek to close the gender gap by equalising opportunities are unlikely to succeed. A recent paper finds that, contrary to popular belief, women and men’s traits are remarkably similar. Ruveyda Nur Gozen and Tim Phillips talk to Michelle Rao and Oriana Bandiera, two of the researchers who wrote the paper, about prejudice, policy, and the stubborn persistence of prior beliefs.

Papers mentioned in the podcast:

Bandiera, O., Parekh, N., Petrongolo, B., & Rao, M. (2022). Men are from Mars, and Women Too: A Bayesian Meta‐analysis of Overconfidence Experiments. Economica, 89, S38-S70. (link to paper)
Bandiera, O., Fischer, G., Prat, A., & Ytsma, E. (2016). Do women respond less to performance pay? Building evidence from multiple experiments. (link to paper)
Rao, M. (2021) Gender Differences in altruism: a Bayesian hierarchical analysis of dictator games. Mimeo
Bayer, A., Hoover, G. A., & Washington, E. (2020). How you can work to increase the presence and improve the experience of Black, Latinx, and Native American people in the economics profession. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 34(3), 193-219. (link to paper)
Bursztyn, L., González, A. L., & Yanagizawa-Drott, D. (2020). Misperceived social norms: Women working outside the home in Saudi Arabia. American economic review, 110(10), 2997-3029. (link to paper)
Diaz-Pardo, G., Rao, M. (2024). Women and Cash Transfers: how program design and local conditions relate to causal estimates of impact.
Field, E., Jayachandran, S., & Pande, R. (2010). Do traditional institutions constrain female entrepreneurship? A field experiment on business training in India. American Economic Review, 100(2), 125-129.
Stansbury, A., & Schultz, R. (2023). The economics profession’s socioeconomic diversity problem. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 37(4), 207-230. (link to paper)