Who Scheduled the Meeting? Gender Biases in Group Initiatives

Coordinating meeting times, planning office parties, changing the toner in the copier. These are three examples of non-promotable tasks (tasks for which the benefit to the group is greater than the benefit for the individual... [ view full abstract ]

Coordinating meeting times, planning office parties, changing the toner in the copier. These are three examples of non-promotable tasks (tasks for which the benefit to the group is greater than the benefit for the individual who performs it). These tasks are traditionally not written in any employee’s job description, but are necessary for a well functioning office place. I examine whether women are more likely to perform non-promotable tasks, and if they are, whether it is caused by underlying differences in beliefs about how other members in the group will act. My experiment uses Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to build off of a working paper by Vesterlund, Babcock, and Weingart. I create an experimental setting to simulate time sensitive tasks that the group would like to accomplish, but each member would personally rather not do. In addition, I directly solicit participants’ beliefs about how they think their group members will act and I look for heterogeneous effects based on the gender composition of the group. I find that women are more likely to volunteer for the task, though I do not find a statistically significant difference in beliefs about how other group members will act between men and women.