Women and Public Policy Program Seminar Series (Women and Public Policy Program, Harvard Kennedy School)

Since 2010, an all-female peacekeeping contingent has been monitoring a fragile ceasefire between the Government of the Philippines and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the southern Philippines. Drawing on in-depth interviews with the peacekeepers, WAPPP Fellow Margaret Jenkins explains how this all-female unit responds to myriad sources of violence, and navigates conservative gender norms. Do these women feel they have been taken seriously by Islamist rebels and Filipino soldiers? What have been their main challenges and successes on the ground? This case is one of several that Jenkins is studying as part of a two-year research project funded by the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada on the effectiveness and experience of all-female contingents working in conflict zones. Speaker: Margaret Jenkins, Research Associate on Peacekeeping, Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace & Security, Georgetown University; Postdoctoral Fellow, Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada; WAPPP Fellow

Is two better than one (or three)? In this seminar, Loyd explores the dynamics of groups with minority duos (such as two women in a group of men). Though many believe that it is worse to be the “only one” in a group, this work finds that men evaluate women more stereotypically when they are in a duo than when there are one or three in a group. In fact, women in duos are rated as contributing less leadership and having fewer skills. In three experimental studies, Loyd looks at how being part of a minority duo can present significant challenges for women.

In this seminar, Laurie Rudman discusses the importance of understanding negative reactions to female leadership in the context of the 2016 election. She presents recent findings, which suggest that White women are more likely to incur backlash compared with Black women.

Laurie Rudman, Professor, Department of Psychology, Rutgers University

 

This seminar explores how gender is enacted by founders of social ventures. In particular, Lakshmi Ramarajan looks at how female social venture founders conform to cultural beliefs about gender-appropriate activities and how this conformity may be reinforced or disrupted by characteristics of the environment in which they are embedded. She argues that the trend towards the use of commercial activities in social ventures is inconsistent with cultural beliefs about gender for female founders of social ventures. Using data on 590 new U.S.-based social ventures during 2007-2008, Ramarajan examined the conditions under which commercial activities are more or less likely to be used by female founders. Results show that female founders of social ventures are less likely to use commercial activities than male founders and that the social venture founders’ local community context moderates this effect in two ways: the prevalence of women-run businesses in the social venture founder`s local community weakens the enactment of gender, while the influence of gender on the use of commercial activities is stronger when the intended beneficiaries of the social ventures are local.

Speaker: Lakshmi Ramarajan, Assistant Professor of Business Administration, Organizational Behavior Unit, Harvard Business School

Over the past five decades, women's educational attainment and labor market participation have increased tremendously. At the same time, many developed countries have faced decreasing birth rates and below replacement fertility levels. All OECD countries, except the US, now provide paid parental leave in order to facilitate family and career compatibility and lower the cost of childbearing. Drawing on insights from a major reform of parental leave benefits in Germany, this seminar explores whether earnings dependent parental leave benefits have a positive impact on fertility, and whether they are successful at narrowing the baby gap between high educated (high earning) and low educated (low earning) women.

Anna Raute, WAPPP Fellow; Assistant Professor in Economics, University of Mannheim

 

The return to work following the birth of a first child is often a period of time when new mothers are working towards mastering the tasks associated with caring for an infant and managing their workplace demands.  New mothers may consider leaving their organization if they question their ability to either effectively perform their job or their parenting roles.  Drawing from social support and social comparison theories, this seminar explores how supportive work environments shape new mothers’ turnover intention.  Using a sample of 695 new mothers who had recently returned to work following the birth of their first child, Ladge finds evidence that perceived manager support and role models who portray work and family balance influence both job and maternal self-efficacies, which contribute to new mothers’ turnover intentions.

Speaker: Jamie Ladge, Associate Professor of Management and Organizational Development, D’Amore-McKim School of Business, Northeastern University

While gender equity is a core value in public service, women continue to be underrepresented in the top-level of leadership of public sector organizations. Existing explanations for why more women do not advance to top leadership positions consider factors, such as human and social capital, gender stereotypes and beliefs about effective leadership, familial expectations, and work-life conflict. Such studies, largely based on private-sector organizations, focus on why women do not reach top leadership positions rather than trying to understand how, or why, some women do. In this seminar, Amy Smith discusses findings from a multi-method study examining career histories of women and men who have reached the top-level of leadership in U.S. federal regulatory organizations. Her analysis identifies a typology of career paths for women and men in public service.  Amy finds that while both women and men assert personal and professional qualifications to legitimize their claims to top leadership positions, they do so in different, possibly gendered, ways.

Amy E. Smith, Associate Professor of Public Policy and Public Affairs, McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies, University of Massachusetts Boston

How can we work toward greater gender equality and women’s empowerment in OECD countries and emerging economies around the world? The OECD’s answer is focusing on the 3 “E”s: education, employment and entrepreneurship. Recent public policy initiatives such as the OECD Gender Recommendation and gender work by the G20 forum emphasize the importance of increasing female labor force participation to achieve strong and balanced growth. OECD’s Head of Social Policy Division, Monika Queisser reviews these recommendations and other initiatives in the OECD countries, and disseminates new findings that aim to achieve better representation of women in public sector leadership. Speaker: Monika Queisser, Head of Social Policy Division, Directorate of Employment, Labour and Social Affairs, OECD

Costly sabotage occurs when individuals risk incurring losses in order to hurt their competitors. When are individuals more likely to engage in such dysfunctionally competitive behavior? Are there any gender differences in propensity to engage in costly sabotage? Pinar Fletcher studies these questions in three laboratory experiments.

There is an assumption that placing women in organizations’ high-status groups will be instrumental in the further diversification of their group. However, research has demonstrated that women, who are often sole representatives of their gender in high-status groups (solos), do not support female candidates trying to gain membership. As a result, management may look to female incumbents who have voluntarily helped other women in the past, although these female solos may actually feel licensed to give up the opportunity to select female candidates. In this seminar, Michelle Duguid examines experimental studies demonstrating that value threat underlies female solos’ decisions in the selection of a female candidate. For example, in situations where women experience less value threat, such as when they are majority group members or when they feel valued by their group members, they are more likely to favor a female candidate.

Michelle Duguid, Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior, Olin Business School, Washington University in St. Louis

Research on gender and risk taking indicates men have a greater tolerance for risk compared to women. This seminar explores the effects of gendered contextual cues on women’s risk preferences. Heidi Liu discuses experimental and archival data that finds women become more risk averse in masculine stereotypical realms in decision contexts. She shares analysis from an intervention tested to mitigate women’s risk aversion in masculine decision contexts: exposure to a counter-stereotypical role model (e.g., women succeeding in masculine-stereotypical performance domains). Speaker: Heidi Liu, Ph.D. Candidate in Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School; J.D. Candidate, Harvard Law School

Can symbolic awards motivate individuals to contribute their ideas and knowledge to a common project? Jana Gallus presents results from a large-scale natural field experiment at Wikipedia, exploring whether a purely symbolic award scheme can be used to motivate new editors and thus mitigate Wikipedia's editor retention problem. In a new project, she seeks to understand how awards have to be designed in order to enhance their recipients' self-confidence in gender-incongruent fields and encourage high-ability individuals to contribute their ideas. Speaker: Jana Gallus, Postdoctoral Fellow, Behavioral Insights Group, Harvard Kennedy School

Discover powerful hidden social "levers" and networks within your company. Then, use that knowledge to make slight "tweaks" that dramatically improve both business performance and employee fulfillment! Drawing on insights from his book, People Analytics, MIT Media Lab innovator Ben Waber shows how sensors and analytics can give you an unprecedented understanding of how your people work and collaborate, and actionable insights for building a more effective, productive, and positive organization.

Ben Waber, President and CEO, Humanyze; Visiting Scientist, MIT Media Lab

 

Gender inequality in workplaces and in homes around the globe reflects individual attitudes and abilities, intra-household bargaining and legal and socio-cultural influences. Research that considers factors across the individual, household and cultural levels simultaneously is essentially nonexistent. This paper explores how gender attitudes are shaped by the national context, how these shape intra-household bargaining, and how women’s and men’s lives at work and at home are altered in the process. Just as the industrial revolution prompted a new way of life by separating earning an income from domestic caretaking, the rise of a new economy is again reshaping the ways people organize work and care. The decline of stable jobs, along with the rise of optional and fluid intimate partnerships, has created unpredictable occupational and interpersonal prospects for women and men alike. How are 21st century adults responding to these growing conflicts and uncertainties? What are the implications for gender – and class – inequality? And what are the possibilities for creating more egalitarian options? Drawing on her recent book, “The Children of the Gender Revolution,” as well as early findings from a new study of workers residing in Silicon Valley, Gerson will present a framework for exploring and explaining the changing landscape of gender, work, and care in the new economy. Speaker: Kathleen Gerson, Professor of Sociology, New York University

This paper examines whether social stigma or peer sanctions associated with academic achievement or effort adversely affects girls’ school performance (in absolute terms, or relative to boys). The effects of the introduction of a point system and “leaderboard” into computer-based math and English courses in high schools in California revealed previously hidden information, namely who the top performers were in the class. This study finds that the system led to a very large decline in performance for students who were at the top of the class prior to introduction (those most “at risk” of being in the leaderboard), and a smaller increase in performance for students at the bottom of the class. Despite results from previous studies on stigma and performance, this study finds no differences in these effects between boys and girls in either English or math. The net effect of the point system and leaderboard worsen overall performance. Speaker: Robert Jensen, Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy, University of Pennsylvania

Researchers studying the gender wage gap often analyze data that puts income into bins, such as $0-10,000, $10,000-20,000, and $200,000+. Many methods have been used to analyze binned incomes, but few have been evaluated for accuracy. In this seminar, Paul von Hippel compares and evaluates three methods: the multi-model generalized beta estimator (MGBE), the robust Pareto midpoint estimator (RPME), and the spline CDF estimator. He finds that the MGBE and RPME produces comparable results, while the spline CDF estimator is much more accurate. Paul has implemented all three methods in software for Stata and R.

Paul von Hippel, Associate Professor of Public Affairs, Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, The University of Texas at Austin

 

Why do some armed groups commit massive wartime rape, while others never do? Using an original dataset, I describe the substantial variation in rape by armed actors during recent civil wars and test a series of competing causal explanations. I find evidence that the recruitment mechanism is associated with the occurrence of wartime rape. Specifically, the findings support an argument about wartime rape as a method of socialization, in which armed groups that recruit by force— through abduction or pressganging—use rape to create unit cohesion. I examine observable implications of the argument, based on months of fieldwork, in case studies of the conflicts in Sierra Leone, El Salvador and Timor-Leste, and consider some of the longterm consequences of conflict-related mass rape. Speaker: Dara Kay Cohen, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School

The first is based on a paper I will be presenting at the ECPR conference in early September titled “Exploring Viewer Reactions to Media Coverage of Female Politicians.” This paper explores voters’ responses to non-verbal cues provided by politicians and often included in media coverage. Past research on women and politics has found that in its coverage, the media has tended to focus disproportionately on the assertive behavior and emotional displays of female candidates, yet little work has explored the implications of this coverage on voters’ impressions of these political figures despite its potential to evoke or challenge stereotypes of women and/or politicians. This paper begins to unravel some of the impact that these non-verbal cues may have on voters’ evaluations of politicians and in particular female candidates. Speaker: Joanna Everitt, WAPPP Fellow, University of New Brunswick

Although there is still a gender division of labor in post-industrial countries, evidence seems to suggest that there is a growing number of fathers that want to be more involved with their children. Using a Time Use Survey, this seminar analyzes how paternal time devoted to children under 10 years old differs across educational level, income, age, number of paid working hours, occupation, and partner’s occupation, among other independent variables. Understanding patterns of fathers, who are more involved with their children, will presumably give some clues on how to promote gender equality in parenting. Furthermore, while research shows that fatherhood involvement is positively related with child outcomes and gender equality, less is known about the benefits of having both work and family roles for working fathers themselves and their jobs. Using the conceptual framework of work-family enrichment, Marc Grau-Grau explores how resources developed at home are positively transferred and applied at work.

Marc Grau-Grau, WAPPP Fellow; PhD Candidate in Social Policy, School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh 

How can we foster and integrate feminist ideas into development conversations that take place in large international organizations? WAPPP fellow Elisabeth Prügl finds that feminist ideas have triumphed and been tamed at the same time within the World Bank. Prügl analyzes a variety of documents and interviews with gender experts to identify how these contradictory effects have taken place. Speaker: Elisabeth M Prügl, WAPPP Fellow, 2014-2015; Professor of International Relations; Director, Program for Gender and Global Change, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva

Debate abounds about why women continue to be underrepresented in top management positions and in male-dominated domains. This presentation reviews research on an often subtle, but powerful and pervasive, organizational force that discourages men and women from engaging in non-stereotypical roles and behavior: The harassment and mistreatment of gender incongruent employees. The author’s research on this topic is reviewed, from “not man enough” harassment, to the sexual harassment of “uppity” women, to the general mistreatment of non-traditional parents. The presentation concludes with recent studies that distinguish mistreatment from advancement and shed light on the “double bind” for women and the systematic scope of gender regulation in the workplace. SPEAKER: Jennifer L. Berdahl, Montalbano Professor of Leadership Studies: Gender and Diversity, University of British Columbia's Sauder School of Business

How does race and gender intersect in a European context and play out in parliamentary representation? While under-representation of both women and ethnic minorities has received considerable attention, European research traditionally has treated women and ethnic minorities as internally homogeneous and conceptually separate groups. Inspired by research on political representation in the U.S., Liza Mügge investigates parliamentary inclusion and exclusion based on the interactions of gender and ethnicity in the Netherlands. By conducting interviews with ethnic minority members of parliaments and analyzing national policy agendas, Mügge examines how institutional and contextual factors, such as backlash against multiculturalism and feminism, affect political representation in the Netherlands. Speaker: Liza Mügge, WAPPP Fellow, 2014-2015; Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Amsterdam

From faculty meetings and student projects to corporate boards and consulting firms, many decisions are made by groups rather than by individuals. In these settings, individuals may bring differing levels of knowledge and expertise to the table; therefore, the performance of the group depends heavily upon eliciting and acting upon the best information from the most informed individuals. Understanding how individuals make the decision of when toe volunteer information to the group is an important first step toward evaluating the efficiency of different group decision-making procedures. Speaker: Katie Coffman, Assistant Professor of Economics, Ohio State University

Virtually all normative and descriptive models of moral judgment view an agent’s gender as irrelevant to judgments of moral permissibility — whether an action such as sacrificing one life to save five others is carried out by a man or a woman does not qualify its appropriateness. However, we demonstrate that people expect men to be more utilitarian, than women when resolving moral dilemmas. Accordingly, they find utilitarian behavior more appropriate when carried out by male agents. This research suggests that moral judgment is not only evaluative in scope, but also inferential. Individuals view behavior as a signal about character, and because of their prior beliefs about male and female characteristics, they arrive at different judgments when the same behavior is carried out by male and female agents. This paper discusses the organizational implications of the gender bias in moral decision-making.the new economy. Speaker: Jooa Julia Lee, WAPPP Fellow; Doctoral Candidate in Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School

Gender inequality in workplaces and in homes around the globe reflects individual attitudes and abilities, intra-household bargaining and legal and socio-cultural influences. Research that considers factors across the individual, household and cultural levels simultaneously is essentially nonexistent. This paper explores how gender attitudes are shaped by the national context, how these shape intra-household bargaining, and how women’s and men’s lives at work and at home are altered in the process. Speaker: Kathleen McGinn, Cahners-Rabb Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School

Gender differences in education choices are persistent, with females being much less likely to choose STEM fields than males. What, if any, is the role of gender differences in psychological attributes that have received a lot of attention in the behavioral/experimental literature, such a attitudes toward competition, in accounting for this gap? In this paper we show that competitiveness is predictive of education choices of students. Furthermore, gender differences in competitiveness account for roughly 20 percent of the gender gap in education choices. Speaker: Muriel Niederle, Professor of Economics, Stanford University

Gender Inequality persists to varying degrees across post-industrial economies. The seminar introduces the new Weatherhead Initiative at Harvard to study comparative gender inequality in OECD countries and outlines some of the major scholarly and policy challenges relating to the structure of work and its articulation with the family. Speakers: Mary Brinton, Reischauer Institute Professor of Sociology; Department Chair, Department of Sociology, Harvard University and Claudia Goldin, Henry Lee Professor of Economics, Harvard University

We examine whether women’s electoral success induces greater female political participation in subsequent elections using the regression discontinuity afforded by close elections between women and men, and constituency level data on India’s state elections from 1980-2007, We find that electoral victory for a woman leads to a large and significant increase in the share of female candidates from major political parties in the subsequent election. However, most of this is due to the increased propensity of previous candidates to run again; we do not find an increased entry of new female candidates and no change in female or male voter turnout. We construct a stylized model of political candidacy to investigate the mechanisms driving the increased share of female candidates. Our preliminary results suggest that a reduction in voter bias against women is the main mechanism, rather than an increase in the supply of potential women candidates or a reduction in party bias against women. Speaker: Lakshmi Iyer, Associate Professor and Marvin Bower Fellow, Harvard Business School

Women are dramatically underrepresented in legislative bodies (supply), and most scholars agree that the greatest limiting factor is the lack of female candidates. However, voters’ subconscious biases (demand) may also play a role, particularly among conservatives. In this seminar, Jessica Preece discusses her findings from a field experiment conducted in partnership with a state Republican Party. She finds that party leaders’ efforts to increase both supply and demand (especially both together) result in a greater number of women elected as delegates to the statewide nominating convention. Her field experiment shows that simple interventions from party leaders can influence the behavior of candidates and voters, which ultimately leads to a substantial increase in women’s electoral success.

Jessica Robinson Preece, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Brigham Young University; Co-director, Gender and Civic Engagement Lab

This field study of a strategy consulting firm explores how men and women cope with organizational pressures to construct a professional identity that involves full devotion to work. Reid finds that while some people easily embrace this imposed identity, most experience a conflict between it and the less-devoted professional identities that they desire to construct. She traces how men and women navigate this conflict by aiming to stay true to their desired selves while either (1) passing as adherents to, or (2) overtly revealing their deviance from, the imposed identity. Unpacking the different ways in which people manipulate features of their work, we construct and manage these deviant professional selves. Drawing on performance and interview data, she demonstrates how both those who embrace the imposed identity and those pass as adherents to it are held in high esteem and rewarded by the firm, while those who reveal their deviance are recognized as such and penalized. Speaker: Erin Reid, Assistant Professor, Boston University

Organizations traditionally have had a clear distinction between their policies on diversity and inclusion and their talent management. The main driving force behind diversity and inclusion has been being seen to be a good employer, to be able to make claims in the annual report and to feel as though a positive contribution is being made to society. On the other hand, talent management activities have been driven by a real business need to ensure that the organization has the right people with the right skills in the right place to drive operational success. Steve Frost’s latest book, Inclusive Talent Management,  aligns talent management and diversity and inclusion, offering a fresh perspective on why the current distinction between them needs to disappear.

In this seminar, Steve uses case studies from internationally recognised brands such as Goldman Sachs, Unilever, KPMG, Hitachi, Oxfam and the NHS, to show that to achieve business objectives and gain the competitive advantage, it is imperative that organizations take an inclusive approach to talent management. He puts forward a compelling and innovative case, raising questions not only for the HR community but also to those in senior management positions, providing the practical steps, global examples and models for incorporating diversity and inclusion activities into talent management strategy. 

Stephen Frost, WAPPP AY14 Fellow; Founder and Principal, Frost Included

This seminar explores why investigating health inequities in relation to multiple dimensions of social inequality is critical to promoting women's health. Drawing on her quantitative and qualitative research, Madina Agénor addresses how sexual orientation and race/ethnicity simultaneously affect cervical cancer screening among U.S. women and shows that neglecting to examine the role of multiple dimensions of social inequality can lead to interventions that fail to promote the health of the most marginalized women.

Madina Agénor, Assistant Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health

Gender inequality has been identified by UNAIDS as a key driver of the HIV epidemic. In Sub-Saharan Africa, where two-thirds of all HIV-infected people live, young women are up to eight times more likely than men to be infected. Using panel data from the Malawi Diffusion and Ideational Change Project MDICP, this research analyzes the importance of intra-household bargaining power in the context of HIV prevention (i.e., condom use within marriage and HIV-related spousal communication) and risky sexual behavior (i.e., self-reported male extramarital behavior). Data on spouses as well as junior wives (in the case of polygamous marriages) has been matched, which enables for a simultaneous assessment of changes in intra-household bargaining power of both partners. The panel dimension of the data allows me to capture unobserved heterogeneity and time trends by using individual-specific fixed effects and time dummies. Speaker: Berit Gerritzen, WAPPP Fellow, University of St. Gallen

How does exposure during childhood to non-traditional gender role models—working mothers and female parliamentarians—shape men’s and women’s outcomes at work and at home? Across 25 countries, women, but not men, exposed to non-traditional gender role models during childhood are more likely to be employed, more likely to hold supervisory responsibility if employed, and earn higher wages than women whose mothers were home full time. At home, exposure to non-traditional models increases the time men contribute to housework and caring for family members and decreases the time women spend on housework. This research exposes the power of non-traditional gender role models within families and countries as critical factors for reducing gender inequality in labor markets and households around the globe. SPEAKER: Kathleen L. McGinn, Cahners-Rabb Professor of Business Administration; Chair, Doctoral Program, Harvard Business School

How can women get ahead in competitive fields? One proposed way is through sponsorship programs – where a person (the sponsor) advocates for a protégé, and in doing so, takes a stake in her success. While these types of programs have received popular attention, little empirical evidence exists on their effectiveness. Coffman uses a laboratory experiment to explore two channels through which sponsorship has been posited to increase advancement in a competitive workplace. In the experimental setting, being sponsored provides a credible signal of one’s ability and/or creates a link between the protégé’s and sponsor’s payoffs. She finds that both features of sponsorship significantly increase willingness to compete among men on average, while neither of these channels significantly increases willingness to compete among women on average. Similarly, sponsorship has a directionally more positive effect on the earnings of male protégés than female protégés. Therefore, sponsorship does not close the gender gap in competitiveness or earnings. This seminar will explore how these insights from the laboratory could help to inform the design of sponsorship programs in the field. Speaker:  Katie Coffman, Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Ohio State University

Recent literature on non-cognitive skills provides promising evidence on the power of community and classroom based interventions for closing achievement gaps across school quality, race, and class. Yet, much of this work has been conducted on males that attend elite institutions in the U.S. There is very little work on how these same tactics can be implemented to overcome gender barriers and improve educational achievement of girls, particularly those that attend schools in non-western settings. In this seminar, Sally Nuamah investigates the experiences of girls from underprivileged backgrounds in Ghana striving to be the first in their families to go to college. She finds that school structure - leadership, curriculum, and peer networks - mediates the effects of their socio-cultural environments and individual background through the facilitation of positive academic identities (non-cognitive skills) that promote identity building and strategy development. These positive academic identities are useful for navigating the gender specific barriers that these girls face, thereby enabling their academic achievement.

Sally Nuamah, WAPPP Fellow; Joint Postdoctoral Fellow, University Center for Human Values and Center for Study of Democratic Politics, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University

 

In this seminar, Gabriela Ramos shares how the target to reduce the gender gap in labor force participation in G20 countries was agreed. Furthermore, she discusses how the OECD contributed by providing evidence on the business case for gender equality, highlighting the support from major countries and leaders. Ramos references the value of the OECD Gender Strategy to achieve this outcome, as it has been building strong evidence and international comparisons on the three domains it covers: education, employment, and entrepreneurship. She also covers the main policies to reduce the gaps in these domains. The main objective is that the OECD's Gender Strategy promotes family-friendly policies and greater well-being for both women and men.   Finally, Ramos explains how to ensure effective implementation by monitoring progress in the implementation of the OECD gender recommendation and the G20 target.

Speaker: Gabriela Ramos, OECD Special Counsellor to the Secretary-General, Chief of Staff and Sherpa to the G20

Sanbonmatsu discusses her new book (coauthored with Susan J. Carroll), titled “More Women Can Run: Gender and Pathways to the State Legislatures,” (Oxford University Press, 2013). Analyzing nationwide surveys of state legislators conducted by the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), the book advances a new approach for understanding women’s election to office, challenging assumptions of a single model of candidate emergence and the necessity for women to assimilate to men’s pathways to office. For example, Sanbonmatsu asserts that a model of candidate emergence based on relationships and networks better captures women’s decision-making than an ambition framework in which candidacy is self-initiated. More women can run if more efforts are made to recruit women of varying backgrounds. This research also examines party differences and the reasons that Democratic women are outpacing Republican women. Speaker: Kira Sanbonmatsu, Professor, Department of Political Science, Rutgers University

Across the world, the increasing use of digital payments for government to person transactions for social programs has provided an entry point for the world’s poor into the formal financial sector. This phenomenon begs the question: how can governments best leverage this opportunity to enable economic empowerment for women? This seminar explores research that uses a randomized controlled trial to assess how financial inclusion coupled with targeted benefit payments impact women's labor force participation and economic welfare in India.

Simone Schaner, Assistant Professor of Economics, Department of Economics, Dartmouth College

 

Hersch’s research shows that female graduates of elite institutions have lower labor market involvement than their counterparts from less selective institutions, with the gap most pronounced among those with children, and especially mothers with an MBA. This talk will provide recent evidence on opting out among women with elite education and examine the role of differences in preferences as well as economic factors in explaining the grater tendency of elites graduates to have lower labor market activity. We will also address societal consequences of reduced labor market activity among women graduates of elite institutions on prospects for women to advance through the professions, whether workplace inflexibility is an important barrier to women’s professional advancement, and implications for intergenerational equity. Speaker: Joni Hersch, Professor of Law and Economics, Vanderbilt University

In STEM subjects at school girls achieve at the same levels as boys, or higher, but their participation in these important subjects declines as soon as they are able to make choices between subjects. Jo Boaler examines the reasons that girls and women don’t choose to take these subjects by highlighting the inequities in the education system. Boaler finds that a girl's mindset, combined with inequitable teaching of mathematics and science in schools, can affect their decisions to pursue STEM subjects. Speaker: Jo Boaler, Professor of Mathematics Education, Stanford University; Co-Founder of Youcubed

Despite rhetoric supporting the advancement of women on corporate boards, the evidence of any progress in the last decade is meager (outside countries with mandated gender quotas). Archival board data (approximately 5000 U.S. publicly traded firms) from the past decade (2002-2011) shows that the biggest predictor of whether or not a female is appointed to a corporate board is if a woman just left that board. If a man leaves a board there is a corresponding negative effect (though magnitude of this effect is lower). This “gender matching heuristic” was replicated in follow up lab studies, which also showed that although respondents are selecting candidates based on gender matching, they deny using gender as an important factor. We suggest this gender matching is a subconscious heuristic process stemming from the more general status-quo bias. Speaker: Cathy Tinsley, Professor of Management, Georgetown University

In this seminar, the recent efforts by the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) to enforce Title IX policy are considered in the broader context of unsuccessful attempts to establish protection of sexual violence as a civil right in the United States. OCR enforcement has stimulated both praise for its bold determination to address an epidemic of sexual violence on college campuses and criticism for its capacious exercise of administrative power. Bumiller reframes this debate by considering how these regulatory measures are a new chapter in a varied and complex story about the effectiveness of public enforcement of civil rights statutes through the combination of administrative and judicial action. Her work questions whether over reliance on public agency enforcement potentially weakens the participatory and democratic effects of private action. She also examines how current federal regulations regarding Title IX continue a pattern that over emphasizes criminal justice priorities.

Speaker: Kristin Bumiller, George Daniel Olds Professor in Economic and Social Institutions; Chair of Political Science, Amherst College

Do gender quotas matter to policy outcomes, or are they just `window dressing'? In this seminar, Ana Catalano Weeks discusses her findings from one of the first studies of the relationship between quota laws and policy outcomes across countries. She argues that after a quota law, we should expect to see change on issues characterized by gender gaps in preferences, especially if they lie off the main left-right (class-based) dimension in politics -- like maternal employment. She finds that implementing a quota law increases public spending on child care (which encourages maternal employment) and decreases spending on family allowances (which tends to discourage it). Evidence from fieldwork in Portugal and Italy suggests that quotas work by increasing women's leverage within parties and raising the overall salience of gender equality issues with the public and male party elites.

Ana Catalano Weeks, WAPPP Fellow; College Fellow, Department of Government, Harvard University  

 

Rape is common during wartime, but even within the context of the same war, some armed groups perpetrate rape on a massive scale while others never do. In this seminar, Dara Kay Cohen discusses her new book, Rape during Civil War, and examines variation in the severity and perpetrators of rape using an original dataset of reported rape during all major civil wars from 1980 to 2012. Cohen also conducted extensive fieldwork, including interviews with perpetrators of wartime rape, in Sierra Leone, Timor-Leste and El Salvador. Combining evidence from these interviews with statistical analysis of the quantitative data, Cohen argues that armed groups that recruit their fighters through the random abduction of strangers use rape—and especially gang rape—to create bonds of loyalty and trust between soldiers. Results from the book lay the groundwork for the systematic analysis of an understudied form of civilian abuse, and will be useful to policymakers seeking to understand and to mitigate the horrors of wartime rape.

Speaker Dara Kay Cohen, WAPPP Faculty Affiliate; Assistant Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School

While there has been an impressive groundswell of attention to sexual and gender-based violence in conflict research and in international advocacy, there has been little systematic analysis of how organizational power structures and local contexts inform the nature and dynamics of such violence. WAPPP Fellow, Zoe Marks, examines the intersecting dynamics of power and gender in armed groups in Africa by using her extensive research conducted on the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone. Her study analyzes how context and power affect the dynamics of sexual and gender-based violence by looking at when and how women obtain power in armed groups and what their power tells us about the politics of violence. Speaker: Zoe Marks, WAPPP Fellow, 2014; Chancellor's Fellow, Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh

A growing body of research finds that mothers and other caretakers experience disadvantages in the workplace. Professor Correll will present recent research that uncovers the social psychological mechanisms producing these disadvantages. Her argument demonstrates how “family friendly” laws that prohibit discrimination against workers who take family leave can mitigate these biases.  Professor Correll will present experimental evidence that supports this argument and shows that law is more effective than voluntary organizational policies in counteracting the disadvantages caretakers experience at work.  She concludes with a discussion of how workplaces can more effectively reduce the caretaker penalty. Speaker: Shelley Correll, Professor of Sociology, Stanford University

Paternity leave, men's role in childcare, and their work-life balance have become more commonly discussed topics by policymakers and business leaders. What kinds of policies succeed in getting fathers involved in their children's lives from the beginning? What are the long-term consequences for families, in terms of fathers' and mothers' careers, incomes, and the division of household labor at home? In this seminar, Ankita Patnaik discusses how parental leave schemes can be designed to induce fathers to participate and whether small changes in the initial parenting experience can have lasting effects on both parents' behavior. She presents findings from a study that shows that even a few weeks of paternity leave can have a large and persistent impact on sex specialization in the long-term by encouraging a more equal distribution of household responsibilities. Speaker: Ankita Patnaik, Researcher, Mathematica Policy Research

Men and women respond differently to risk. Women are more risk averse than men, which has a significant impact on how they make decisions. Exploring this topic, Alexandra van Geen runs a series of experiments to evaluate under what conditions women and men are more or less willing to take risks. Specifically, she examines whether women and men are more likely to take risks when the financial reward is higher; if they are sensitive to the presence of other risks in the decision environment; or whether winning in the past makes them more likely to take risk in the future. She finds stark gender differences, including that men greatly increase risk taking after winning a lottery, while women do not. Investigating how, when and why men and women respond differently in risky environments can help close the gender gap in risk taking.

Decades after the second wave feminist movement, how do today’s college-aged women think about the effects of combining work and motherhood on children’s outcomes? In Goldberg’s study, she compared how students estimated the effect to meta-analytic effect sizes, which provided the ‘actual’ effects of maternal employment on children. Results indicated that, on average, college women overestimate the negative effects of maternal employment, especially full-time employment, on children. Significant variability in the direction and accuracy of the stereotypes was explained by individual characteristics such as culture/ethnicity, work values, and gender attitudes. In this seminar, we will discuss implications for work/life plans of the generation coming to adulthood. Speaker: Wendy Goldberg, Professor Department of Psychology and Social Behavior, UC Irvine

What is the impact of gender biases on promotion and advancement in the scientific community? Dr. Corinne Moss-Racusin shares her latest research exploring the impact of gender biases on meritocracy, diversity, and the pursuit of knowledge throughout academic science. She discusses educational strategies designed to increase awareness and reduce bias, and provides examples of effective scientific diversity interventions. SPEAKER: Corinne Moss-Racusin, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Skidmore College

Using data from the 1980-2010 time period, Francine Blau provides new empirical evidence on the extent of and trends in the gender wage gap, which declined considerably over this period.  By 2010, conventional human capital variables taken together explained little of the gender wage gap, while gender differences in occupations and industries continued to be important. Moreover, the gender pay gap declined much more slowly at the top of the wage distribution that at the middle or the bottom and, by 2010, was noticeably higher at the top. Francine also uses the literature to identify what has been learned about the explanations for the gap, considering the role of human capital and gender roles, gender differences in occupations and industries, gender differences in psychological attributes, and labor market discrimination against women.

Francine Blau, Frances Perkins Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Professor of Economics, Department of Economics, ILR School, Cornell University

How have gender roles in war changed over the last century? As women have openly joined militaries and paramilitary organizations, the roles of women in service have advanced and diversified. In the United States, the Combat Exclusion Policy was recently lifted to allow women to serve in frontline combat and complete combat operations. Despite increasing numbers of countries beginning to expand the role of women in their militaries, an analysis comparing the U.S. media coverage of British girls in World War I and the #BringBackOurGirls campaign in 2014 suggests that significations of girls as wars’ innocent, hapless victims in need of men’s protection remain prominent in media outlets. This seminar revisits Sue Rae Peterson’s (1977) idea of the ‘protection racket’ to analyze the current status of women in 21st century war and conflict. Speaker: Laura Sjoberg, WAPPP Fellow; Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Florida  

Now that Hillary Clinton is out of government—for the time being at least—this is an opportune time to reflect on the origins and development of the Hillary Doctrine, the challenges and controversy it engendered while she was Secretary of State, and how the Doctrine has affected both the United States and other nations. Is the Hillary Doctrine truly in the American national interest, and furthermore, is it in the interests of countries troubled by war and instability? With the end of her tenure, will U.S. foreign policy continue to focus on women and girls and to what extent does it match the reality of U.S. government policy and programming? In this discussion, we will discuss whether the Hillary Clinton Doctrine will indeed bring about a more stable future for the nations of the world. Speaker: Valerie Hudson, Professor and George H.W. Bush Chair, Texas A&M University

As women began to fill the ranks of management in the 1980s, the impact of motherhood on an individual’s career trajectory and the corporate balance sheet became a source of debate among feminists and business leaders. In this seminar, Elizabeth Singer More examines the “mommy track” argument that some feminists, most prominently Felice Schwartz of Catalyst, claimed would save businesses money by working to retain white-collar women. Schwartz hoped this argument would persuade businesses to provide benefits, such as flex-time and paid maternity leave, which they had resisted providing for years. But there were two significant costs to the “mommy track” argument. The first was the possibility that mothers who did not want to be on a decelerated career track would be involuntarily sidelined. The second was that by basing a claim for treating mothers as valued employees on the company’s profit interest alone, feminists risked losing the standing to demand rights and benefits that did not directly benefit the bottom line.

Elizabeth Singer More, WAPPP Fellow; Lecturer on History and Literature; Lecturer on Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Harvard University

Maternity leave policies have known effects on short-term child outcomes. However, little is known about the long-run impact of such leaves on women’s health as they age. This seminar examines whether maternity leave policies have an effect on women's mental health in older age. Data for women age 50 years and above from countries in the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) are linked to data on maternity leave legislation from 1960 onwards. A difference-in-differences approach that exploits changes over time within countries in the duration and compensation of maternity leave benefits is linked to the year women were giving birth to their first child at age 16 to 25. Late-life depressive symptom scores of mothers who were in employment in the period around the birth of their first child were compared to depression scores of mothers who were not in employment in the period surrounding the birth of a first child and, therefore, did not benefit directly from maternity leave benefits. The findings suggest that a more generous maternity leave during the birth of a first child is associated with reduced depression symptoms in late life. This seminar explores how policies experienced in midlife may have long-run consequences for women’s health and wellbeing. Speaker: Lisa Berkman, Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Public Policy and of Epidemiology; Director, Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, Harvard. T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Historians have long suspected that Queen Victoria’s gender played a role in the rise of constitutional (e.g. ceremonial) monarchy in 19th-century Britain. But what was the nature of this role? In this seminar, Arianne Chernock takes on this question through an archival-based approach by exploring Victoria’s centrality to the early women’s rights movement in Britain – especially in inspiring women to demand the right to vote. Chernock argues that recognizing Victoria’s role in the women’s rights movement allows us to see the shift towards a more restricted Crown as an attempt to contain radical thinking about women, agency, and power to create a more democratic and transparent British state.

Speaker: Arianne Chernock, Associate Professor, Department of History, Boston University

Why has women’s professional advancement stalled? A widely accepted explanation is that women’s family obligations conflict with long hours of jobs, hampering their advancement into senior organizational positions. The commonly championed solution has been policies offering flexible work arrangements designed to mitigate such conflict. Yet research shows that men, too, experience work-family conflict. Moreover, work-family policies do little to help women or men’s workplace advancement, and in fact, often hurt them. In this presentation, Ely draws from her in depth case study of a global professional service firm to ask why the belief that work-family conflict lies at the heart of women’s stalled advancement persists. She explores how this popular narrative self-perpetuates despite evidence to the contrary, and how organizations use this narrative as an explanation for women's blocked mobility partly because it diverts attention from the broader problem of a long-hours work culture among professionals. Speaker: Robin Ely, Professor of Business Administration and Senior Associate Dean, Harvard Business School

This seminar explores the assumption of many cross-national studies that gender-role attitudes fall along a single continuum between traditional and egalitarian. Brinton analyzes over-time data from 18 European countries and identifies trajectories of attitudinal change. Brinton demonstrates that while traditional gender-role attitudes have precipitously and uniformly declined, European nations are not converging towards one dominant egalitarian model but instead are diverging across three distinct varieties of egalitarianism. Speaker: Mary C. Brinton, Reischauer Institute Professor of Sociology, Harvard University

Research on women’s candidate emergence identifies a substantial gender gap in political ambition that is well established by the time women and men enter the professions from which political candidates ten to emerge. More specifically, women are one-third less likely than men—even when they are matched professionally, educationally, and politically—ever to have considered running for office. Yet no empirical research has examined thoroughly the origins of the gender gap in political ambition or the relationship between early socialization and interest in running for office. Based on a new national survey of 4,000 high school and college students, we identify the initial causes of the gender gap in political ambition, which is a prerequisite to closing it. Ultimately, our results speak to the gender dynamics of powerful socializing agents, and allow for an assessment of the likelihood that our political institutions will reach gender parity. Speaker: Jennifer Lawless, Associate Professor, Department of Government, American University

The constraints facing women and girls worldwide range from epidemic levels of gender-based violence to biased laws and norms that prevent them from owning property, working, and making decisions about their own lives. The World Bank’s new book, “Voice and Agency: Empowering Women and Girls for Shared Prosperity,” documents major gender gaps and reviews promising policies and interventions. Underlining that women's agency–their ability to make decisions and act on them independently–has concrete as well as intrinsic value, WAPPP Fellow Jeni Klugman highlights new interventions from around the world that are used to empower women and girls, in conjunction with United Nations post-2015 global development agenda.

Why is it that women still fare worse than men on virtually every major dimension of social status, financial well-being, and physical safety? Sexual violence remains common, and reproductive rights are by no means secure. Women also assume disproportionate burdens in the home and pay a price in the world outside it. Deborah Rhode, professor of law at Stanford University, reviews why these issues are not cultural priorities and what can be done to change this. Speaker: Deborah Rhode, Professor of Law, Stanford University

With gender equality increasingly a business imperative, in addition to being a human right, many leaders across the sectors wonder how we can get there. In the first WAPPP Seminar of 2015-16, Professor Bohnet discusses her forthcoming book "What Works: Gender Equality, By Design" (Harvard University Press 2016). Reviewing the impact of what we have been doing to date, including diversity and leadership trainings, networking, and mentorship/sponsorship programs, Bohnet proposes a new approach to leveling the playing field. Building on insights from Behavioral Economics, she argues that to overcome gender bias in organizations and society, we should focus on de-biasing systems—how we evaluate performance, hire, promote, structure tests, form groups—rather than on trying to de-bias people. Speaker: Iris Bohnet, Professor of Public Policy; Director, Women and Public Policy Program, Harvard Kennedy School

Gender diversity is a moral and a business imperative. But unconscious bias holds us back, and debiasing people’s minds has proven to be difficult and expensive. Behavioral design offers a new solution. Building on her talk in the fall and her new book, WHAT WORKS: Gender Equality By Design, Professor Bohnet will discuss what organizations can do create more inclusive environments, level the playing field and help diverse teams succeed. Speaker: Iris Bohnet, Professor of Public Policy; Director, Women and Public Policy Program, Harvard Kennedy School

Despite efforts aimed at gender equality in positions of power, women are underrepresented in most high-level positions in organizations. Recent data suggests that less than 5% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women, less than 15% of executive officers, and less than 20% of full professors in the natural sciences. In this seminar, Francesca Gino discusses recent research that sheds light on the question of why women are underrepresented in top leadership positions. She explores work that shows that men and women view professional advancement differently, and their views affect their interest and decisions to climb the organizational ladder. Francesca presents cross-cultural data that speaks to this issue. Additionally, she explores work from a second study that demonstrates that men and women have different preferences when it comes to the future.

Francesca Gino, Tandon Family Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School 

 

Although women have made great in attaining positions of power in recent decades, there still remains barriers to women in not only continuing to attain these positions, but also in maintaining them. Women face different challenges than men in the quest for leadership roles and their ability to hold onto these positions. For women, power can still be hard to earn, difficult to signal to others (once power is attained), and, in certain circumstances, easy to lose. Gender stereotypes—our beliefs about what men and women are like—continue to shape our perceptions of women and can ultimately impede women’s progress in gaining, exercising, and maintaining power and leadership. My research on women and the precariousness of their power has examined women in top leadership roles (e.g., the United States Senate), experiments in the lab, and interviews with women who have managed to navigate the challenges of being in leadership positions. Speaker: Victoria Brescoll, WAPPP Fellow; Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior, Yale School of Management

To better understand the historical origins of current differences in norms and beliefs about the appropriate role of women in society, Professor Alesina tests the hypothesis that traditional agricultural practices influenced the historical gender division of labor and the evolution and persistence of gender norms. Finding that, consistent with existing hypotheses, the descendants of societies that traditionally practiced plough agriculture, today have lower rates of female participation in the workplace, in politics, and in entrepreneurial activities, as well as a greater prevalence of attitudes favoring gender inequality. They identify the causal impact of traditional plough use by exploiting variation in the historical geo-climatic suitability of the environment for growing crops that differentially benefited from the adoption of the plough. To isolate the importance of cultural transmission as a mechanism, they examine female labor force participation of second-generation immigrants living within the US. Speaker: Alberto Alesina, Nathaniel Ropes Professor  of Political Economy, Harvard University

Men and women throughout the world want to provide for their families and ensure their children have a good start in life. Often, the chance to start a business or get a job is the surest way to accomplish this goal. But how can we be sure that women have the same opportunities as men to fulfill their economic potential? The World Bank Group's Women, Business and the Law project presents a unique dataset examining how the law can help or impede women from working and earning an income and what can be done to improve women's economic rights.

Hannah Riley Bowles will review some of the latest research on how gender influences career-related negotiations and discuss practical implications. Participants will receive a workbook with questions to help them prepare for career-related negotiations.

The American family is changing, but our public policies have not kept pace. In 1967, 2/3 of American children had at least one stay-at-home parent, and only 1/3 had all their parents working. Today, because of increases in maternal employment (and single motherhood), the situation is reversed: 2/3 of children have all their parents working, and only 1/3 have a stay-at-home parent. In addition, more workers now have responsibility for elders or other dependents, due to increased longevity and smaller baby boom families. These challenges are not unique to the US, but are more acute here than in peer countries, because our public policies have not been updated to reflect them. To meet the needs of children when parents work, and to help adults caring for the elderly or other dependents, our policies must provide more comprehensive work-family supports—paid family leave, other forms of paid leave, workplace flexibility, and child care. This is particularly true for low-income families who currently have the least access to such benefits at work and who have fewer resources with which to buy them. Why is the US such an outlier in this regard, and what might we be able to do about it? Speaker: Jane Waldfogel, Professor of Social Work and Public Affairs, Columbia University

Only two OECD countries continue to exhibit an M-shaped curve of female labor force participation across the life cycle: Japan and South Korea. In this seminar, Mary Brinton analyzes how labor market structure and workplace norms influence this pattern. Her analysis draws on data from over 160 in-depth interviews with highly-educated Japanese and Korean men and women of childbearing age, and demonstrates how working conditions exert a powerful influence on gendered patterns of behavior at home and in the labor market.

Mary Brinton, Reischauer Institute Professor of Sociology, Harvard University

In the past 50 years, marital rates have declined significantly, especially among lower socioeconomic groups. Meanwhile increase in the ease of divorce and improvements in contracting outside of marriage (e.g.,child support laws) have made marriage increasingly similar to cohabitation, except for in the treatment of assets upon divorce. Corinne Low, together with coauthor Jeanne Lafortune, present a case that as the commitment offered by marriage declined, this division of assets offered extra "insurance" to women in high asset unions. This in turn encouraged investment in child human capital, even at the cost of one's own earnings, and allowed marriage to retain its value amongst asset holders particularly homeowners. Meanwhile, the value of marriage eroded for other groups, creating a wealth gap in marriage rates that may underly the apparent income, race, and education gap. 

 

Corinne Low, Assistant Professor of Business Economics and Public Poliy, The Wharton School University of Pennsylvania.

In this seminar, Clémentine Van Effenterre assesses whether a short in-class intervention by an external female role model can influence students' attitudes towards science and contribute to a significant change in their choice of field of study. The intervention consists of a one hour, one off visit to a high school classroom by a volunteer female scientist. It is targeted to change students’ perceptions and attitudes towards scientific careers and the role of women in science, with the aim of ultimately reducing the gender gap in scientific studies. Using a random assignment of the interventions to 10th and 12th grade classrooms during normal teaching hours, Clémentine finds that exposure to female role models significantly reduces the prevalence of stereotypes associated with jobs in science, for both female and male students. While Clémentine finds no significant effect of the classroom interventions on 10th grade students’ choice of high school track the following year, her results show a positive and significant impact of the intervention on the probability of applying and of being admitted to a selective science major in college among 12th grade students. This effect is essentially driven by high-achieving students and is larger for girls in relative terms. After the intervention, their probability to be enrolled in selective science programs after graduating from high school increases by 30 percent with respect to the baseline mean.

Clémentine Van Effenterre, WAPPP Postdoctoral Fellow

In this seminar, Ashley Martin discusses the consequences of being “aware of” or “blind to” intergroup differences on women’s workplace outcomes. In contrast to organizational best-practices for race relations, which argue that recognizing racial differences is more effective at reducing racial bias than is ignoring them, she shows that deemphasizing, rather than embracing, gender differences promotes men’s inclusion and women’s empowerment.

Ashley Martin, PhD Candidate, Columbia Business School

 

Do corporate sexual harassment programs reduce harassment?  If they do, new programs should boost the share of women in management because harassment causes women to quit. Sexual harassment grievance procedures incite retaliation, according to surveys, and our analyses show that they are followed by reductions in women managers. Sexual harassment training for managers, which treats managers as victims’ allies and gives them tools to intervene, are followed by increases in women managers. Training for employees, which treats trainees as suspects, can backfire. In this seminar, Frank Dobbin discusses how programs work better in workplaces with more women managers, who are less likely than men to respond negatively to harassment complaints and training. Politicians and managers should be using social-scientific evidence to design harassment programs.

Frank Dobbin, Harvard University, Department of Sociology

Few programs for economically empowering rural women focus primarily on farming—the one occupation in which women have the most experience in largely agrarian economies. Thus, two Indian initiatives–in Telangana and Kerala– stand out. These initiatives are unique because they seek to improve women’s livelihoods within agriculture through an innovative institutional form, namely group farming. In this seminar, Bina Agarwal examines whether pooling land, labor, and capital and cultivating jointly, enables women farmers to overcome resource constraints and outperform individual male farmers in the same regions.

Bina Agarwal, Professor of Development Economics and Environment, University of Manchester; Diane Middlebrook and Carl Djerassi Visiting Professor, University of Cambridge

Having children may reduce the probability that women are promoted in a variety of professions because early productivity falls despite the existence of short family leave programs. But the problem may be particularly acute at research intensive universities where research productivity before the tenure decision is especially important. In repsonse, many of the institutions have adopted gender-neutral tenure clock-stopping policies so women-and men-do not have to sacrifice family for career, and vice-versa. The extra time on the tenure clock is inteneded to account for the negative productivity shock associated with having a child. While these policies are equal in the sense that they give the same benfit to women and men who have children, they are inequitable in that the time cost (or productivity loss) experienced by men and women is quite different. Using data from top 50 economic departments from 1980-2005, Kelly Bedard shows that these policies raise male tenure rates while at the same time reducing female tenure rates. 

 

Kelly Bedard, Department Chair and Professor of Economics, University of California, Santa Barbara

In this seminar, Sabrina Karim focuses on the role women have played in peacekeeping, arguing that increasing the number of women is important, but so are gender norms within peacekeeping missions. She demonstrates that in order to make peacekeeping missions more effective at protecting civilians in war torn countries, particular attention to gender is needed.

Sabrina Karim, Assistant Professor; Caplan Faculty Fellow, Government Department, Cornell University 

Join us for the first installment of the Gender and Security Seminar Series. In this seminar, Andreas Kotsadam examines whether the exposure of men to women in a traditionally male-dominated environment can change gendered attitudes. The context is the military in Norway, where female recruits were randomly assigned to some squads but not others during boot camp. Findings show that living and working with women for 8 weeks caused men to adopt more egalitarian attitudes. Specifically, there was a 14 percentage point increase in the fraction of men who think mixed-gender teams perform as well or better than same-gender teams, an 8 percentage point increase in men who think household work should be shared equally and a 14 percentage point reduction in men who strongly disavow feminine traits. Contrary to what many policymakers have predicted, there is no evidence that integrating women into squads hurt male recruits' satisfaction with boot camp or their plans to continue in the military. These findings demonstrate that even in a highly gender-skewed environment, gender stereotypes are malleable and can be altered by integrating members of the opposite sex.

 

Andreas Kotsadam, Senior Researcher, The Frisch Centre; Affiliated Researcher, Department of Economics, University of Oslo

Using lab and online experiments with more than 2000 participants this work documents that women are less prone than men to compete against others, but equally willing to challenge themselves to improve and compete with their own past performance. The authors further explore the roles of risk attitudes and confidence and suggest that these factors can account for why there is a gender difference in the willingness to enter other-competitions, but not self-competitions. The effects are driven observability by single male peers.

 

Johanna Mollerstrom, Professor of Economics, Humboldt University, Department Head, "Competition and Consumers", DIW Berlin

Scholars have widely discussed colorism – the differential treatment of same-race individuals based on skin color – with regard to the African-American community. They have less frequently examined colorism’s worldwide dimensions. Yet, the manufacture of products offering the prospect of lighter, brighter, whiter skin is a multi-billion dollar global industry, with Asia being a key market. Importantly, the salience accorded skin color varies depending upon geographical location and social context. In this seminar, Professor Jones will discuss: (1) the ways in which skin color operates within different racialized communities, with a specific focus on African Americans, Asians, and Asian Americans; and (2) how skin tone differences influence perceptions of individual and group identity and complicate coalition building within and across racial groups.

Trina Jones, Jerome M. Culp Professor of Law, Duke University School of Law

Join us for an HKS Gender and Security Seminar Series event featuring Theresia Thylin, PhD Candidate in the Essex University (UK) Department of Sociology and a Gender and Humanitarian Specialist at the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women) in New York. Chelsea Green, PhD candidate in the Harvard Department of Government, will serve as a discussant. This event is organized by Dara Kay Cohen, Ford Foundation Associate Professor of Public Policy, and Zoe Marks, Lecturer in Public Policy. 

This HKS Gender and Security Seminar Series event features Aaron Belkin, Professor of Political Science at San Francisco State University and author of How We Won: Progressive Lessons from the Repeal of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell.'  Juliette Kayyem, Belfer Lecturer in International Security, HKS, moderates the discussion. The HKS Gender and Security Seminar Series brings leading experts from academia and the policy world, working at the intersection of gender, human rights, and security, to Harvard Kennedy School. The spring 2019 series focuses on the theme of “LGBT in War,” featuring speakers from the academic and policy worlds addressing LGBT issues in national militaries, non-state armed groups and the experiences of LGBT victims of war.

Aaron Belkin, Professor of Political Science at San Francisco State University

Juliette Kayyem, Belfer Lecturer in International Security, Harvard Kennedy School

In this seminar, Michela Carlana analyzes the impact of teachers' gender stereotypes on student achievement. She collects a unique dataset including information on the Gender-Science Implicit Association Test (IAT) of teachers and students' outcomes, such as performance in standardized test scores, track choice, and self-confidence. Michela finds that teachers’ stereotypes induce girls to underperform in math and self-select into less demanding high-schools, following the track recommendation of their teachers. These effects are at least partially driven by a lower self-confidence on own math ability of girls exposed to gender biased teachers.

Michela Carlana, WAPPP Faculty Affiliate; Assistant Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School

In this seminar, Jia Xue discusses the current state of domestic violence law in China. In particular, she focuses on how this social issue transfers into a policy agenda. Jia draws on findings from her current project, which examines the use of social media in the context of intimate partner violence in China. Additionally, she introduces another project investigating the impact of intimate partner violence on mental health through the examination of Weibo messages (Chinese version of Twitter).

 

Jia Xue, Ph.D. Candidate in Social Welfare, University of Pennsylvania. Fellow, Carr Center for Human Rights

The challenges and barriers that women face in both entering into and performing effectively in leadership roles have been widely documented across many research domains.  In this seminar Aparna Joshi takes a look at this issue from the perspective of both women and men in leadership roles. First, she unpacks conditions under which women leaders can be effective change agents in highly male-dominated settings. Based on a sixteen- year longitudinal data set of women legislators in the US Congress she examines how the content of bills can prime the legitimacy of women in leader roles and predict their success in passing bills over the course of their tenures.  Second, shifting the focus on men in leadership roles, she also problematizes the “think manager think male” paradigm that has been applied extensively to understand barriers faced by women, from the perspective of men. Based on a sample of Fortune 500 male CEOs she examines the consequences for firm performance and CEO pay among men who subscribe (or not) to masculine stereotypes.  Through these two studies she aims at highlighting new ways of thinking about gender and leadership effectiveness.

 

Aparna Joshi, Arnold Family Professor of Management, Smeal College of Management, Penn State University 

 

Organizing for the Equal Rights Amendment the first time round, in 1972-82, tapped the strengths and experienced the weaknesses of social movements in general.  The strengths of social movements derive from their “hydra-headed” qualities:  the activists bubble up from many different arenas, giving the movement great flexibility, adaptability, diversity, and intelligence.  The weaknesses derive from their relative absence of selective incentives, so that the motivation for activism is primarily ideological commitment.  That commitment in turn, creates a “dynamic of deafness,” in which activists are unlikely to listen and learn from their opposition.  In this seminar, Jane Mansbridge discusses how the current organizing effort has learned in different ways from the past.

Jane Mansbridge, Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values, Harvard Kennedy School

Millennials are often publically criticized for being apathetic about the American political process and their lack of interest in political careers. But what do millennials themselves have to say about the prospect of holding political office? Are they as uninterested in political issues and the future of the American political system as the media suggests? What do we learn by looking at both gender and racial groups’ political ambition comparatively?

In this seminar, Shauna Shames goes directly to the source and draws from extensive research, including over 50 interviews and an extensive survey (n=760), with graduate students in elite institutions that have historically been a direct link for their graduates into state or federal elected office: Harvard Law, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and Boston’s Suffolk University Law School. Shauna, herself a young graduate of Harvard University, suggests that millennials are not uninterested; rather, they don’t believe that a career in politics is the best way to create change. Millennials view the system as corrupt or inefficient and are particularly skeptical about the fundraising, frenzied media attention, and loss of privacy that have become staples of the American electoral process. They are clear about their desire to make a difference in the world but feel that the “broken” political system is not the best way to do so—a belief held particularly by millennial women and women of color.

Shauna Shames, Assistant Professor, Political Science Department, Rutgers University-Camden

Dr. Betsy Paluck and Dr. Ana Gantman present a behavioral perspective on campus sexual assault. Prominent models of sexual assault portray assault perpetrators as one of two extremes. In the clinical model, perpetrators are seen as unchangeable deviants. In the cultural model, perpetrators are a product of rape culture. The behavioral perspective analyzes how individual psychological phenomena and environmental configurations interact, and drive patterns of sexual assault. For example, the behavioral approach enables researchers to analyze how different contexts activate perceived norms, goals, and moral language, which shifts the likelihood of assault. Based on this theoretical framework, Dr. Paluck and Dr. Gantman field-tested an intervention in Princeton University eating club parties. A student-driven initiative requiring party-goers to read aloud a definition of consent at the door was tested by varying the framing of the consent language and the identity of the person presenting the consent language. In this seminar, Dr. Paluck and Dr. Gantman present results and discuss lessons for the design, implementation, and research on the effects of university policy on sexual assault.

Betsy Paluck, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology and Woodrow Wilson School of Public Affairs, Princeton University

Ana Gantman, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Woodrow Wilson School of Public Affairs, Princeton University

Millions of people disclosed sexual harassment and violence against them following the #MeToo breakthrough in October 2017. Despite the fact that advocates, individuals and the government had been taking action to address sexual harassment, it remains a widespread problem that prevents employees from reaching their full potential. Monica Ramirez, a national recognized expert on ending workplace sexual violence and the author of the Dear Sisters letter that helped spark the TIMES UP movement, will discuss the policy measures, as well as the employment and societal norms that must be addressed to meaningfully address this problem.

Monica Ramirez, MC/MPA 2015, Co-Founder and President, Alianza Nacional de Campesinas

How does women's concern about confirming gender stereotypes (i.e., stereotype threat) predict their engagement in professional leadership contexts? In this seminar, Zoe Kinias shares findings from five studies with global businesswomen. Her findings show how stereotype threat predicts psychological disengagement, how an intervention can buffer against deleterious effects of stereotype threat, and stereotype threat's silver lining--that it motivates attitudes and actions in support of gender balance.

Zoe Kinias, Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior, INSEAD; Academic Director, Gender Initiative, INSEAD

Gender stereotypes persist in society. Many of these stereotypes are prescriptive, indicating how men and women should behave in social situations. However, an outstanding question is whether these normative gender beliefs apply equally to men and women of additional social categories. In this seminar, Sa-Kiera explores this question using an intersectional approach by asking participants to indicate the desirability of men, women, and people of different sexual orientations and races displaying a series of masculine and feminine traits. The results clearly show that although the category “man” and “woman” have different prescriptive stereotypes that haven’t substantively changed since 2002, race and sexual orientation substantively alter the landscape of these gendered stereotypes. These findings have implications for norm violation accounts of discrimination.

Sa-Kiera Hudson, WAPPP Fellow; Ph.D. Candidate in Psychology, Sidanius Lab for the Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations, Harvard University

  After decades of convergence, the gender gap in employment outcomes has recently plateaued in many wealthy countries, despite the fact that women have increased their investment in human capital over this period. In this seminar, Jessica Pan analyzes these two trends using an event-study framework with data from the U.S. and U.K. Her findings provide evidence that women in modern cohorts underestimate the impact of motherhood on their future contributions to the labor market. Upon becoming parents, women adopt more negative views toward female employment and report that parenthood is harder than they expected. Jessica also examines whether young women’s expectations about the future labor supply are correct when they make their key educational decisions. She finds that female high school seniors are increasingly and substantially overestimating the likelihood they will be in the labor market in their thirties, which is a sharp reversal from previous cohorts of women who substantially underestimated their future labor supply. Jessica concludes the seminar by specifying a model of women’s choice of educational investment to reconcile the expectations of motherhood across generations.   Jessica Pan, WAPPP Research Fellow; Associate Professor of Economics, National University of Singapore  

Nonbinary gender identities have quickly gone from obscurity to prominence in American public life, with growing acceptance of gender-neutral pronouns, such as “they, them, and theirs,” and recognition of a third-gender category by U.S. states including California, Colorado, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oregon, and Washington. People with nonbinary gender identities do not exclusively identify as men or women. The increased visibility of a nonbinary minority creates challenges for other rights movements, while also opening new avenues for feminist and LGBT advocacy. In this seminar, Jessica Clarke asks what law and policy would look like if they took nonbinary gender seriously. She assesses the legal interests in binary gender regulation in areas including law enforcement, employment, education, housing, and health care, and concludes these interests are not reasons to reject the broader project of nonbinary inclusion.

Jessica Clarke, Professor of Law, Vanderbilt Law School

Do women and men view delegation differently? In this seminar, Modupe Akinola shares her research showing that women imbue delegation with more agentic traits, have more negative associations with delegating, and feel greater guilt about delegating than men. These associations result in women delegating less than men and, when they do delegate, having lower-quality interactions with subordinates. Furthermore, she discusses an intervention that can attenuate women’s negative associations with delegation.

Modupe Akinola, Sanford C. Bernstein Associate Professor of Leadership and Ethics, Columbia Business School 

The purpose of diversity initiatives is to help groups that face disadvantage in society (e.g., women, racial/ethnic minorities, etc.) achieve better outcomes in organizations, but they do not necessarily work as intended. In this seminar, Lisa Leslie first presents a typology of four unintended consequence types—backfire, negative spillover, positive spillover, and false progress—as well as theory regarding the underlying mechanisms and processes that produce them. She next provides empirical examples illustrating the different unintended consequence types. She concludes by using the typological theory to derive potential interventions aimed at increasing diversity initiative effectiveness.

Lisa Leslie, Associate Professor of Management and Organizations, New York University 

  Despite efforts to diversify the ranks of top management across the private and public sectors, women and racial minorities continue to be underrepresented in these leadership positions. In this seminar, Stephanie Creary examines the important role that “helping” plays in the career paths of women and minority leaders in elite jobs and, more specifically, the perspectives and actions of men who hold the majority of these roles. Drawing on findings from an on-going study of Army officers, Stephanie reveals the similarities and differences in officers’ interpretations of what it means to help others at work.   Stephanie Creary, Assistant Professor of Management, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

Gender equality is a moral and a business imperative. But unconscious bias holds us back, and de-biasing people’s minds has proven to be difficult and expensive. Diversity training programs have had limited success, and individual effort alone often invites backlash. Behavioral design offers a new solution. By de-biasing organizations instead of individuals, we can make smart changes that have big impacts. Presenting research-based solutions, Iris Bohnet hands us the tools we need to move the needle in classrooms and boardrooms, in hiring and promotion, benefiting businesses, governments, and the lives of millions.

Iris Bohnet, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government; Academic Dean, Harvard Kennedy School; Co-Director, WAPPP 

In India, there persists a striking gender gap in political participation and representation. This political gender gap persists despite decades of democracy and universal adult suffrage, rapid economic development, and large-scale policies aimed at women's political empowerment. Women's political participation is important not only on normative grounds of inclusion, but because research shows that when women do participate, politics changes. Presenting findings from her book project, Soledad Prillaman evaluates the importance of social networks for women's political empowerment and documents how women who have become active political agents  are received and resisted by traditional political networks.

Soledad Prillaman, Postdoctoral Fellow, Nuffield College, Oxford University

 

Megan MacKenzie's presentation explores the history of the combat exclusion and the recent integration of women into combat roles. It introduces the equal/different double bind as a framework for understanding the impossible expectations often put on women in male dominated fields. Women are expected to be equal and integrate fully into the work culture; yet they are also expected to ‘add value’ and transform institutions. Does this equal/different double bind set women up for failure? Her presentation explores this question through an analysis of women in combat.

Megan MacKenzie, Associate Professor of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney