The gender gap in wages remains persistent. Even after controlling for a range of observable factors such as education, experience, time outside the workforce, choice of occupation and industry, women earn less than men. Some researchers have turned to looking at behavioural differences, such as differences in competitiveness (see here for example), negotiation, self-promotion, and so on. This job market paper by Lily Liu and Marshall Mo (both Stanford University) asks whether there is a gender gap in apologies. Their argument is simple:
Workers’ apologies may be interpreted by their superiors as a signal of incompetence. Some popular writers suggest that women apologize too readily for their transgressions, potentially holding them back in the workplace...
So, if women apologise more than men, they may receive lower pay as a result. Liu and Mo test this with a series of experiments. In the first experiment, they test whether there is a gender gap in apologies. As they explain, in their 'worker experiment':
We let workers perform a task where their performance affects the likelihood of their paired employer getting a high payment. Here, workers’ task performance is a proxy for their ability. If employers get a low payment, workers might feel the need to apologize. Workers can send a message to their paired employers. We use three types of messages to capture both the extensive and intensive margins of apologies: a free-form message where workers can send anything, a binary message where workers choose either “yes” or ‘no” to sending “I am sorry about this outcome.”, and a continuous message where workers indicate from a scale of 0 to 100, how much they agree with the statement “I am sorry about this outcome.”. We hypothesize that female workers apologize more conditional on having the same task performance.
In this worker experiment, they find that:
...the gender apology gap exists: conditional on the same task performance, female workers are twice as likely to apologize in the free-form message and apologize 14% more in the continuous apology message. The apology gap remains significant after controlling for confidence: after workers are informed of their absolute and relative performance, female workers apologize 12% more than male workers. This suggests that confidence is not the only reason behind the apology gap.
So, women apologise more. But does this matter? In a second experiment, Liu and Mo test the labour market implications of apologies. Specifically, in their 'employer experiment':
Each employer is paired with ten workers, and for each worker, employers will decide whether to promote that worker after learning the worker’s basic information (gender, age group, and education level), whether the task succeeded (i.e. if the employer got a high payment), and the continuous apology message. Employers are incentivized to promote workers who have above-average performance. Additionally, we ask employers to guess the worker’s task performance and report how warm they feel toward that worker. We test if employers infer lower ability from workers’ apologies and examine how apologies influence employers’ promotion decisions.
In this employer experiment, they find that:
...employers infer lower ability from apologies. Conditional on all the information employers learn about the worker (gender, age group, education level, and whether the task succeeded), employers think workers who apologize more in the continuous message have worse task performance. At the same time, apologies increase employers’ warmth toward the worker, which mitigates the negative effect of apologies on promotion. As for how the apology gap affects female workers’ labor market outcomes, we find that employers are aware that female workers apologize more when asked about it, but they do not take it into account when making ability inferences. As a result, employers infer a lower task performance from female workers.
Finally, Liu and Mo conducted a survey at the end of their worker experiment, to test whether their findings might hold in the real world. In this survey:
...we find that female workers apologize more than male workers.
They also back this up with a:
...textual analysis of 2 million congressional speeches and show that congresswomen are about 30% more likely to give speeches containing apologetic words.
There is much more detail on the specifics of the experiments in the paper. However, this is research with a clear and practical implication: Stop apologising! Especially, if you are a woman.
[HT: Marginal Revolution, last November]
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