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Gender Equality by Design

Iris Bohnet

Gender equality is a moral and a business imperative. But unconscious bias holds us back, and de-biasing people’s minds has proven to be difficult and expensive. Diversity training programs have had...

Performance reviews in firms are common but controversial. Managers’ subjective appraisals of their employees’ performance and employees’ self-evaluations might be affected by demographic characteristics. As self-evaluations are typically shared with...

We examine a new intervention to overcome gender biases in hiring, promotion, and job assignments: an “evaluation nudge,” in which people are evaluated jointly rather than separately regarding their future performance. Evaluators are more likely to focus...

Women, and particularly women in all-female groups, appear to be especially adept at providing public goods in developing countries. We use a one-shot Public Goods game to explore the effect of sex and a group's sex composition on the voluntary provision...

Norms of reciprocity help enforce cooperative agreements in bilateral sequential exchange. We examine the norms that apply in a reciprocal-exchange economy. In our one-shot investment game in a Nairobi slum, people adhered to the norm of “balanced...