Qualifications, Willingness, and Gender Debiasing in Leader Selection
49 Pages Posted: 7 Sep 2021 Last revised: 2 Aug 2022
Date Written: September 5, 2021
Abstract
This study examines how the selection of group leaders is affected by individual qualifications and willingness to lead in different task settings using laboratory experiments. The experimental treatments focus on whether the candidate’s information involves the willingness to lead, and whether the group leader’s task emphasizes ability or leader’s social responsibility in an environment with gender-balanced group composition and gender-neutral tasks. We find that, women had lower willingness to lead than men, and the number of votes for women increased when the candidate’s background information does not include willingness to lead. Furthermore, the impact of information treatment about willingness to lead on leaders’ performance depends on the setting of the leader task. For the leader task that emphasizes ability, leaders of both genders perform equally well regardless of the information treatment. By contrast, for the leader task requiring social responsibility, while male leaders’ performance is invariant to the information treatment, female leaders with elicited willingness to lead have better performance than their counterparts with no such elicitation.
Keywords: leader selection; willingness to lead; gender differences; ability; responsibility
JEL Classification: C92,D83,J16
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation