Favoritism, Social Pressure, and Gender Evidence from Football

Abstract

We analyse gender differences in the response to social pressure. Our setting provides information on decision making by both female and male referees towards rewarding extra time in football. The exact score at the time of the decision allows us to evaluate how much it favours the home team and hence pleases the crowd. Controlling for in-game information that affect the length of extra time per rules of the game such as sanctions and goals scored, we find that female referees bend more towards social pressure and reward less excessive extra time when the home team needs the game to end to secure a win. Additional results suggest that this gender difference is larger among younger referees.

Keywords: social pressre, gender differences, Home bias