An incentivized belief elicitation experiment on gender stereotypes in peer ability attribution

Abstract Beliefs about ability shape hiring, promotion, and pay even when objective performance does not differ by gender. Drawing on status characteristics theory, statistical discrimination, and the representativeness account of stereotypes, this study asks whether peer evaluators differentiate their ability estimates by target gender when accuracy is financially rewarded and the task is fully visible. In a two-stage design, 18 undergraduates first completed mathematical, verbal, and effort-based tasks, producing benchmark scores for six gender-by-major cells. A separate sample of 344 undergraduate raters then inspected the tasks and estimated the score of each target cell, identified by gender, academic major, and year of study, with payment tied to estimation accuracy. Raters did not differentiate by target gender overall ( $$d = -0.001$$ ) or within any task domain ( $$|d| \le 0.05$$ ). However, gender differentiation was conditional on the target’s field. In mathematics the major-by-gender interaction was significant. Female economics targets received higher estimates than male economics targets ( $$d = -0.41$$ ), a difference that survived correction for multiple comparisons, whereas the differences among engineering and education targets did not. Female raters also assigned higher estimates than male raters in the mathematical and effort domains, independently of target gender. The findings indicate that when evaluators hold both a diffuse status cue (gender) and a task-relevant cue (field of study), the field dominates, and that gender expectations in this population are field-conditional rather than uniformly stereotyped. Implications for the design of evaluative environments are discussed.