Do Meritocratic Evaluations Encourage Women to Enter Male-Majority Workplaces? Experimental Evidence

We study whether anticipated discrimination affect workers’ preferences for entering a competitive hiring process in an online experiment. Our experimental design exogenously varies whether i) the hiring process is meritocratic—the best performing worker in a pair is always hired—or subjective—based on a manager’s evaluation, and ii) the gender of the other worker and manager. Our primary focus is on female workers in male-majority environments, where anticipated discrimination may be particularly salient. Contrary to our hypothesis, we find no significant effect of meritocratic versus subjective evaluation on women’s willingness to enter the hiring process. Heterogeneity analyses provide suggestive evidence that women who believe they are the best performers exhibit a stronger preference for meritocratic evaluations. However, the estimated effect size is moderate and does not vary with the gender composition of other workers.