"Potential" and the Gender Promotion Gap

主讲人：Alan Benson (University of Minnesota)
论文合作者：Danielle Li (MIT) and Kelly Shue (Yale)                                                                                       

时间：11月3日（周三）上午10：00-11：30
参会方式：zoom会议线上平台（若有意参会，请发送姓名、学院至18701189960@163.com以获取会议链接，仅限北大师生）
主持人：（国发院）赵耀辉、李玲、刘国恩、雷晓燕、张丹丹、郑恩营
             （经院）秦雪征、石菊、王耀璟、袁野
论文摘要： 
We show that widely-used subjective assessments of employee "potential" contributes to gender gaps in promotion and pay.  Using data on management-track employees from a large retail chain, we find that women receive substantially lower potential ratings despite receiving higher job performance ratings. Differences in potential ratings account for 30-50% of the gender promotion gap. Women's lower potential ratings do not appear to be based on accurate forecasts of future performance: women outperform male colleagues with the same potential ratings, both on average and conditional on promotion.  Yet, even in these cases, women's subsequent potential ratings remain low, suggesting that firms persistently underestimate the potential of female employees.
主讲人简介：
Alan Benson is an Associate Professor in the Work and Organizations Group at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management, where he holds a Mary and Jim Lawrence Fellowship. He is also on the graduate faculty of the Department of Applied Economics and the Minnesota Population Center, and is an associate editor in the Organizations department of Management Science. He received his PhD in 2013 from the MIT Sloan School of Management and BS from Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations in 2007.
His research is in personnel economics: the economic analysis of human resources. His studies primarily involve working with companies to analyze their hiring, promotions, and incentives using interviews, applied theory, and econometric methods. He also reads across disciplines and collaborates with organization researchers outside economics, particularly with economic sociologists. His work has been published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Health Economics, American Sociological Review, Demography, Management Science, Organization Science, the ILR Review, and Industrial Relations, and covered by the NY Times, WSJ, NPR, Financial Times, and other outlets.