Essays on Affirmative Action Policies and Women's Chances of Success: An Experimental Approach

This thesis includes three chapters. The first chapter relies on the continuation of my master dissertation "Positive Discrimination in Childhood and Adolescence: Culture as a Determinant Factor of Individual Behavior". In this project, we implemented an artefactual experiment in four different countries to observe i) how social preferences develop with age and ii) how the scheme of social preferences changes depending on the ethnicity of the individuals with whom the individuals are interacting. This is done using a range of mini-dictator games from which we classify 665 subjects into a variety of behavioural types. We expand on previous developmental studies of pro-sociality and parochialism by analysing individuals aged 9-67, and by employing a cross country study where participants from Spain interact with participants from different ethnic groups (Arab, East Asian, Black and White) belonging to different countries (Morocco, China, Senegal and Spain). We identify a "U-shaped" relationship between age and egalitarianism that had previously gone unnoticed, and appeared linear. An inverse "U-shaped" relationship is found to be true for altruism. A gender differential is found to emerge in teenage years, with females becoming less altruistic but more egalitarian than males. In contrast to the majority of previous economic studies of the development of social preferences, we report evidence of increased altruism, and decreased egalitarianism and spite expressed towards black individuals from Senegal. Our findings highlight the importance of studying social preferences from both an early age and in later life. As social preferences can enhance efficiency in many workplace interactions, understanding how they develop over the life cycle is important for understanding how socialisation can impact preferences over outcomes. With the working population growing older, and workplaces becoming more diverse, understanding the interaction between social preferences, age and identity is therefore important for the design of institutions and their associated incentives in many societies. The second and third chapters study the impact of Affirmative Action Policies on female candidates' chances of success in the labor market. Affirmative action describes policies that support members of a disadvantaged group that has previously suffered discrimination in such areas as education, employment, or housing. Some countries use a quota system, whereby a certain percentage of government jobs, political positions, and school vacancies must be reserved for members of a certain group; an example of this is the reservation system in India. In some other regions where quotas are not used, minority group members are given preference or special consideration in selection processes. In the United States, affirmative action in employment and education has been the subject of legal and political controversy. In 2003, the Supreme Court of the United States maintained the prohibition on the use of quotas, considering race as a plus-factor when evaluating applicants. In other countries, such as the UK, affirmative action is rendered illegal because it does not treat all races equally. However, support for affirmative action has sought to achieve goals such as bridging inequalities and protect minorities from the discrimination in the labor market and education. In the case of the labor market, despite the considerably growth of female employment derived from the use of Affirmative Action Policies (especially through gender quotas), the gender inequality in the labor market still persists. According to the "2019 Report on Equality between women and men in Europe" (European Commission, 2019), women earn, on average, 14,7% less per hour than men. The gender wage gap is especially higher for managerial positions (23%). Moreover, only the 26.7% of the boards and the 6.5% of the CEOs are female (EU, 2019). The gender gap in labor market outcomes suggests that Affirmative Action Policies could be ineffective in fostering career advancement. Therefore, the effectiveness of these policies should be revised. In the second chapter, we aim to investigate how gender quotas affect the allocation of workers into different tasks within the organizations. We run a laboratory experiment in which we recruited 128 employers and 120 workers. Employers were asked to hire workers to conform a team of six workers and assign them to two different tasks, in terms of complexity and profitability. We found that gender quotas are useful in increasing the number of high-ability women assigned to the simpler and less profitable task in organizations but ineffective in improving women assignment to more complex and profitable tasks. In fact, gender quotas have a negative effect on the probability that high-ability women are assigned to the most complex and profitable tasks. We contribute to the existing literature studying the effectiveness of gender quotas in addressing the gender gap in organizations by including an analysis of task assignment decisions and highlighting how gender quotas may not be effective in breaking this mechanism at the basis of the documented gender gap in career progression and wages. Finally, the third chapter provides experimental evidence of the effect of committees' gender composition on female candidates' probabilities of being recruited. The underrepresentation of women in the labor market has been attributed, among other factors, to the lack of women in recruitment committees. Therefore, committee quotas are becoming more widespread. To address this question, I designed a laboratory experiment in which groups of three subjects have to jointly select two candidates in a pool of six to perform a task. The results contradict the implicit assumption that more women in committees would automatically benefit female candidates. In fact, male-majority committees increased the probabilities of female candidates to be recruited compared to other committees' compositions, while committees in which women are majority are the most detrimental for female candidates. The latter can be explained by the fact that men are more influential than women in female-majority groups and they disproportionately proposed to recruit two male candidates.