Publications

17 Oct 2022
News

How Companies Can Tackle The Gender Burnout Gap

Web

Diversity & Entrepreneurship: Race & Gender Gaps Persist - Race, Gender & Equity

Pathways to Inclusive Entrepreneurship Diversity & Entrepreneurship: Race & Gender Gaps Persist Entrepreneurship is the path of choice for many Harvard Business School alumni. Drawing on the most recent Life... View Details

Article

The Impact of Penalties for Wrong Answers on the Gender Gap in Test Scores

By: Katherine B. Coffman and David Klinowski

Multiple-choice exams play a critical role in university admissions across the world. A key question is whether imposing penalties for wrong answers on these exams deters guessing from women more than men, disadvantaging female test-takers. We consider data from a... View Details

Keywords: Behavioral Economics; Standardized Testing; Gender; Higher Education; Prejudice and Bias

17 Sep 2018
Working Paper Summaries

The Impact of Penalties for Wrong Answers on the Gender Gap in Test Scores

Keywords: by Katherine B. Coffman and David Klinowski; Education

20 Apr 2015
News

Chelsea Clinton on Using Data to Eliminate the Gender Gap

2009
Article

Shedding Light on the Gender Gap through Randomized Field Studies

By: Connie Chen, Felipe Kast and Dina D. Pomeranz

19 Oct 2022
News

Pay Transparency

September 2024
Article

Networking Frictions in Venture Capital, and the Gender Gap in Entrepreneurship

By: Sabrina T. Howell and Ramana Nanda

We find that male participants in Harvard Business School’s New Venture Competition who were randomly exposed to more VC investors on their panel were substantially more likely to start a VC-backed startup post-graduation, indicating that access to investors impacts... View Details

Keywords: Networks; Information Frictions; Venture Capital; Gender; Business Startups; Entrepreneurship

July 2024
Article

A (Dynamic) Investigation of Stereotypes, Belief-Updating, and Behavior

By: Katherine B. Coffman, Paola Ugalde Araya and Basit Zafar

Many decisions—such as what educational or career path to pursue—are dynamic in nature, with individuals receiving feedback at one point in time and making decisions later. Using a controlled experiment, with two sessions one week apart, we analyze the dynamic effects... View Details

Keywords: Feedback; Beliefs; Stereotypes; Self-assessment; Gender Gap; Gender; Equality and Inequality; Perception; Decision Choices and Conditions

Purchase

16 Jan 2014
News

How to close the gender gap at work? Strike a pose

29 Jul 2022
News

Will Demand for Women Executives Finally Shrink the Gender Pay Gap?

25 Feb 2015
News

Why the Gap Between Worker Pay and Productivity Is So Problematic

April 2018
Article

We Ask Men to Win & Women Not to Lose: Closing the Gender Gap in Startup Funding

By: Dana Kanze, Laura Huang, Mark Conley and E. Tory Higgins

Male entrepreneurs are known to raise higher levels of funding than their female counterparts, but the underlying mechanism for this funding disparity remains contested. Drawing upon Regulatory Focus Theory, we propose that the gap originates with a gender bias in the... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Finance; Gender; Prejudice and Bias

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2022
Article

Gender Inequality in Research Productivity During the COVID-19 Pandemic

By: Ruomeng Cui, Hao Ding and Feng Zhu

We study the disproportionate impact of the lockdown as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak on female and male academics' research productivity in social science. The lockdown has caused substantial disruptions to academic activities, requiring people to work from home.... View Details

Keywords: Gender Inequality; Research Productivity; Telecommuting; COVID-19 Pandemic; Research; Performance Productivity; Gender; Equality and Inequality; Health Pandemics

March 2019
Article

Beliefs about Gender

By: Pedro Bordalo, Katherine Baldiga Coffman, Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer

We conduct laboratory experiments that explore how gender stereotypes shape beliefs about ability of oneself and others in different categories of knowledge. The data reveal two patterns. First, men’s and women’s beliefs about both oneself and others exceed observed... View Details

Keywords: Performance Evaluation; Perspective; Prejudice and Bias; Gender

March 2022
Teaching Note

Inclusive Innovation at Mass General Brigham

By: Katherine Coffman and Olivia Hull

Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 921-006, “Inclusive Innovation at Mass General Brigham." This case invites students to explore the individual and structural factors that lead to an under-representation of women in male-dominated domains, and to think critically about... View Details

Keywords: Inclusion; Gender Gap; Gender Inclusivity; Gender; Equality and Inequality; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques

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2016
Working Paper

Who Pays for White-Collar Crime?

By: Paul Healy and George Serafeim

Using a proprietary dataset of 667 companies around the world that experienced white-collar crime, we investigate what drives punishment of perpetrators of crime. We find a significantly lower propensity to punish crime in our sample, where most crimes are not reported... View Details

Keywords: Crime; Gender Bias; Women; Women Executives; Corruption; Legal Aspects Of Business; Firing; Human Capital; Human Resource Management; Prejudice and Bias; Crime and Corruption; Judgments; Law Enforcement; Human Resources; Corporate Governance; Gender

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