I am the Director of the Freedom Center and an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Economy and Moral Science at the University of Arizona (bear down!). Most of my research is on decision making using methods in behavioral and experimental economics. My lab is the Decision and Economic Sciences Laboratory. I received my Ph.D. in Economics and Mechanism Design from the University of Arizona. From 2012-2013, I served as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation in the Decision, Risk, and Management Sciences program.
Economists have recently advanced the explanation that at least in part the gender wage gap persists because of women themselves: women are less likely to negotiate higher salaries, ask for well-deserved pay raises, apply for promotions even when fully qualified, and shy away from male-dominated, higher-paying positions. So women are simply less competitive than men: the wage gap then is explained at least in part by the competitiveness gap. In fact, in 2023, a mere 10% of fortune 500 CEOs are women and this is a record high. What my research has demonstrated is that women are as equally competitive as men, but they exhibit it in different contexts. Rather than having a lower desire to compete, women are motivated by different incentives as a reflection of their evolutionary and cultural constraints. Women are motivated by social incentives. What does that mean? We’ve been researching a variety of them: (1) the incentive to winning is a sharing option where the winner has the option to share whatever money they earn with a low performer following the competition, (2) the incentive is that you share some portion of your earnings with a charity of your choice (joint with Michalis Drouvelis), (3) the incentive to winning is a voucher for children’s books, and (4) the incentive to winning are products that are acceptable to female interests such as beauty products or scarfs. Under social incentives, women exhibit their desire to compete! So narrowing the wage gap will depend on a better understanding of what can drive women to compete more aggressively in the labor market. In fact, the 2022 World Economic Forum, based on our research, has as one strategy to close the gender wage gap the need for more research to understand why social incentives motivate women to compete (strategy #8). TLDR: The wage gap doesn’t exist and persist due to women ourselves but rather organizations need to be sensitive to compensation incentives! We need to change the system, not the women. For an overview of our research please see our 2022 article in Philosophical Trans B.
This work with Alessandra Cassar on understanding the role of competitiveness in the gender wage gap has been covered in the Financial Post, on KVOA, KJZZ’s The Show, KOLD, and Australian Broadcasting Company. It has been profiled in the Daily Mail, Cosmos Magazine, Futurity, among others. To see more about the coverage, please visit my press page.
I’ve presented our research in the National Science Foundation’s Social and Behavioral Sciences Distinguished Lecture Series, Arizona Department of Economic Security, Invest in Girls Launch with Arizona Council of Economic Education, National Science Foundation’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion for Women’s Equality Day, and at U of A Commission on the Status of Women “A Woman’s Worth: Advancing and Empowering” event.