Emma Williams-Baron

In collaboration with Claire Daviss and Erin Macke.

We use six survey experiments to investigate three main theoretical questions about gender inequality in the workplace. First, how does an accountability intervention operate across contexts (first in a context where gender and parental status are salient, and next in a gendered and racialized context)? Second, how does a candidate’s history of remote work affect evaluators’ perceptions of their hireability for positions with traditional work arrangements, and how does this effect differ by gender and parental status? And third, how do evaluators’ preferences for certain candidates (women versus men, parents versus non-parents) differ when hiring for remote positions versus when hiring for in-person positions? Across these three studies, each of which includes two survey experiments, we also explore a methodological question: can digital trace data be leveraged to detect bias and understand theoretical mechanisms in survey experiments? Digital trace data are records of participants’ behaviors (such as mouse clicks, time spent reading sections of a resume, etc.) rather than their expressed attitudes or beliefs, and can therefore yield new insights into theoretical questions when paired with traditional survey measures.