Attribution bias by gender

About this event

This study investigates gender-based attribution bias, the tendency to attribute men's success to ability and women's failure to a lack of ability- using a controlled principal, agent online experiment. We test for this bias across male- and female-typed tasks. In male-typed tasks, we find evidence of attribution bias after task success: principals are more likely to attribute success to ability when the agent is male. We do not observe such bias following failure. In contrast, in female-typed tasks, we find bias against men following task failure, pointing to the importance of task domain in shaping attribution patterns. Our design allows us to rule out taste-based and statistical discrimination. Attribution bias is stronger among individuals with more regressive gender attitudes but only for male-typed task, suggesting an attitudinal basis for attribution patterns. To assess external validity in a developing country context, we complement the lab evidence with preliminary results from a field experiment with employers in urban India to test for attribution bias by gender in an urban retail setting.