The Why Axis: Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life by Uri Gneezy, John List Read Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Uri Gneezy, John List
differently to incentives. Our research shows that many women tend to avoid competitive settings and jobs in which salary is determined by relative rankings.
To illustrate, consider the following large-scale field experiment that we conducted on Craigslist. 5 In this experiment, we wanted to directly discover the factors that drive people to apply for entry-level jobs. How would men and women respond to different compensation scenarios? Would women go after jobs that required some competitiveness and risk-taking if the salary offered were higher?
To get some answers, we placed two ads on Internet job boards in sixteen cities for an administrative assistant, one of the most common jobs in the United States. An example of one of our job postings in Seattle read as follows:
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P OSTING C ATEGORY : admin/office jobs
T ITLE : Seeking Sports News Assistant
The Becker Center is seeking a Seattle-area administrative assistant to help gather information on sports stories in the Seattle region. While the Becker Center is based in Chicago, we have a satellite project in Seattle. The assistant will provide us with up-to-date information on local news and views on basketball, football, baseball, soccer, Nascar, golf, tennis, hockey and other sports. Responsibilities for the position include reading local sports-related news coverage (pro, semi-pro, and college) and preparing short reports. The successful candidate will also be comfortable with typical administrative duties—light correspondence, proofreading, filing, email and phone communication, etc.
C OMPENSATION : Hourly
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Our second job description looked almost identical to this one, but it didn’t mention sports. Instead, the description noted, “The assistant will provide us with up-to-date information on community events, arts and culture, business, entertainment, policy issues, crime, and other stories. Responsibilities for the position includeseeking out, reading, and summarizing local news stories and preparing short reports.”
Over a period of four months, nearly 7,000 interested job seekers applied for these jobs listed in the various cities. 6 Upon responding to our ad, some were told that they would be paid on an hourly basis, while others were told that their pay would depend on how they performed compared to a coworker.
Our goal was to see if the competitive aspect influenced one sex more than the other. 7 What do you think we found after placing several months of ads on Craigslist? Which sex continued to show interest in our job after being told of the wage structure?
Not surprisingly, guys were more interested in the sports-oriented ad and women responded to the non-sports-oriented ad: whereas 53.8 percent of the job seekers for the sports-related job were women, 80.5 percent of those responding to the alternate job were female.
But the real differences showed up when we described the compensation schemes. According to one scheme, the job would pay a flat $15 per hour. Not too shabby for an entry-level office administration gig. The competitive pay scheme, on the other hand, rewarded the workers based on how they performed in relation to a coworker. Applicants were told that they would be paid $12 per hour but would be compared to another worker, and whichever of the two performed better would receive a bonus of $6 per hour in addition to the $12-per-hour base pay. In this way, each of the two compensation schemes paid an average of $15 per worker, but one was highly incentivized, whereas the other was not.
You might be surprised (and saddened) by the actual gender breakdown of who applied for each kind of job. In general, women didn’t like the competitive option; in fact, they were 70 percent less likely than men to go after the competitive job. Further, the women who did apply for the highly incentivized job tended to
To illustrate, consider the following large-scale field experiment that we conducted on Craigslist. 5 In this experiment, we wanted to directly discover the factors that drive people to apply for entry-level jobs. How would men and women respond to different compensation scenarios? Would women go after jobs that required some competitiveness and risk-taking if the salary offered were higher?
To get some answers, we placed two ads on Internet job boards in sixteen cities for an administrative assistant, one of the most common jobs in the United States. An example of one of our job postings in Seattle read as follows:
----
P OSTING C ATEGORY : admin/office jobs
T ITLE : Seeking Sports News Assistant
The Becker Center is seeking a Seattle-area administrative assistant to help gather information on sports stories in the Seattle region. While the Becker Center is based in Chicago, we have a satellite project in Seattle. The assistant will provide us with up-to-date information on local news and views on basketball, football, baseball, soccer, Nascar, golf, tennis, hockey and other sports. Responsibilities for the position include reading local sports-related news coverage (pro, semi-pro, and college) and preparing short reports. The successful candidate will also be comfortable with typical administrative duties—light correspondence, proofreading, filing, email and phone communication, etc.
C OMPENSATION : Hourly
----
Our second job description looked almost identical to this one, but it didn’t mention sports. Instead, the description noted, “The assistant will provide us with up-to-date information on community events, arts and culture, business, entertainment, policy issues, crime, and other stories. Responsibilities for the position includeseeking out, reading, and summarizing local news stories and preparing short reports.”
Over a period of four months, nearly 7,000 interested job seekers applied for these jobs listed in the various cities. 6 Upon responding to our ad, some were told that they would be paid on an hourly basis, while others were told that their pay would depend on how they performed compared to a coworker.
Our goal was to see if the competitive aspect influenced one sex more than the other. 7 What do you think we found after placing several months of ads on Craigslist? Which sex continued to show interest in our job after being told of the wage structure?
Not surprisingly, guys were more interested in the sports-oriented ad and women responded to the non-sports-oriented ad: whereas 53.8 percent of the job seekers for the sports-related job were women, 80.5 percent of those responding to the alternate job were female.
But the real differences showed up when we described the compensation schemes. According to one scheme, the job would pay a flat $15 per hour. Not too shabby for an entry-level office administration gig. The competitive pay scheme, on the other hand, rewarded the workers based on how they performed in relation to a coworker. Applicants were told that they would be paid $12 per hour but would be compared to another worker, and whichever of the two performed better would receive a bonus of $6 per hour in addition to the $12-per-hour base pay. In this way, each of the two compensation schemes paid an average of $15 per worker, but one was highly incentivized, whereas the other was not.
You might be surprised (and saddened) by the actual gender breakdown of who applied for each kind of job. In general, women didn’t like the competitive option; in fact, they were 70 percent less likely than men to go after the competitive job. Further, the women who did apply for the highly incentivized job tended to
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