Essays in gender economics

This dissertation, titled Essays in Gender Economics, brings together four studies, each shedding light on how gender shapes economic behaviour, decision-making and outcomes. The first essay investigates the effectiveness of Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) statements in Spain and Germany, using an online experiment. It shows that targeting women with explicit equal opportunity statements encourages them to apply for high-paying managerial roles, without discouraging men. The second essay uses a pre-registered lab experiment to examine gender differences in explore-exploit tasks, focusing on exploration and competition under both gain-only and gain-loss environments. Surprisingly, women exhibit more exploration in gain-only settings, and once individual risk attitudes are considered, the initially lower tendency to compete that they show in gain-only environments aligns with that of men. The third essay examines employee responses to pay and job discrimination through a large-scale online labour market experiment conducted in Germany and Romania. It finds that discrimination increases complaints, particularly job discrimination, but does not reduce effort. Women under discrimination exert more effort and report stronger emotional distress than men. Finally, the fourth essay analyses more than five million university syllabi and, using a Monte Carlo benchmark that represents gender-neutral matching, shows that mixed-gender co-teaching teams occur at roughly half the rate expected; teaching team gender composition is also correlated with the novelty, interdisciplinarity, and gender diversity of the readings assigned in courses.