Abstract
We conduct a field and an online classroom experiment to study gender differences in self-set performance goals and their effects on performance in a real-effort task. We distinguish between public and private goals, performance being public and identifiable in both cases. Participants set significantly more ambitious goals when these are public. Women choose lower goals than men in both treatments. Men perform better than women under private and public goals as well as in the absence of goal setting, consistent with the identifiability of performance causing gender differences, as found in other studies. Compared to private goal setting, public goal setting does not affect men's performance at all but it leads to women's performance being significantly lower. Comparing self-set goals with actual performance we find that under private goal setting women's performance is on average 67% of goals, whereas for men it is 57%. Under public goal setting the corresponding percentages are 43% and 39%, respectively.
Highlights
Gender equality is one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 5) elaborated by the United Nations Development Programme in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.1 A more specific goal is to increase women’s participation and leadership in all forms of decision-making in the public, judiciary, and private sector.2 Why should we care about the underrepresentation of women in leading positions? The empirical literature provides initial evidence that benefits of gender equality in the workplace exist because of complementarities between the two genders.3There are many reasons for the imbalance between women and men in leading positions
In terms of the ratio between performance and goals, participants are more realistic under private than under public goal setting, with women being more realistic than men in both cases
302 students participated in our experiment, out of which 124 (41%) were female and 178 (59%) male.20 69 students were assigned to the control treatment (NoGoal), 97 to the Private Goal Setting Treatment (PrivGoal), and 136 to the Public Goal Setting Treatment (PubGoal)
Summary
Gender equality is one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 5) elaborated by the United Nations Development Programme in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. A more specific goal is to increase women’s participation and leadership in all forms of decision-making in the public, judiciary, and private sector. Why should we care about the underrepresentation of women in leading positions? The empirical literature provides initial evidence that benefits of gender equality in the workplace exist because of complementarities between the two genders.. The specific question that motivates our work is whether gender differences in public goal setting could be one reason for the female underrepresentation in high-level positions. But individuals in general face many situations on the labor market and in private life, in which their performance is observable and identifiable and they may use self-set goals – private or public – as a commitment device. We shed light on this question, and investigate experimentally how women and men set goals for themselves and perform in a particular real-effort task, where performance is publicly observable and identifiable. Men perform better than women under private and public goals as well as in the absence of goal setting, consistent with the identifiability of performance causing gender differences as found in Schram et al (2019).
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