Information for Evaluators and Women’s Risk-Taking | WIP Seminar with Hyeun Lee

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Meeting ID: 875 9388 1616

Abstract: Anne Bowers and I investigate the role of evaluation on gender differences in risk-taking. Prior literature suggests that the provision of greater information leads to more accurate evaluation of women and men, with direct benefits for evaluators. We instead study indirect yet important effects and ask whether the provision of greater information for evaluators enables women to change their behavior. When evaluation of risk-taking is difficult due to information constraints, men’s and women’s risk-taking may not be evaluated on par, creating uncertainties for women in how their work will be assessed. When evaluators have greater information, women may take more risks than before. We study the boldness of earnings estimates to examine risk-taking of analysts and use the staggered adoption of the Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval (EDGAR) to capture the exogenous increase in information available for investors, key evaluators in our setting. We show that female analysts take more risks relative to men in tasks with greater importance for careers, after the adoption of EDGAR, suggesting that the provision of information for evaluators not only changes evaluation outcomes, but the behaviors of those being evaluated.

Hyeun Lee is the Project Lead of Gender Analytics and an Assistant Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. Hyuen's research interests lie in gender inequality and social networks, with a particular interest in how access to private and public information affects marginalized individuals and evaluators.

Our CIRHR Work-In-Progress Seminar series allows members of our community to discuss early-stage research. Future guest speakers include:

• When do employers update their recruitment behavior based on interview outcomes?
  April 3, Santiago Campero, CIRHR Assistant Professor
   
• The Gender Wage Gap and Redistribution
  April 10, Kourtney Koebel, CIRHR Sessional Lecturer