Anticipated Discrimination, Choices, and Performance: Experimental Evidence

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Elsevier via the DOI in this record.This paper studies experimentally whether potential perceived discrimination affects decisions in a labor-market setting with different stereotypes. Participants are assigned to a seven-person group and randomly allocated a role as a firm or worker. In each group, there are five workers and two firms. The only information firms have about each worker is a self-selected avatar (male, female or neutral) representing a worker's gender. Each firm then decides which worker to hire. Female workers react to potential discrimination when they know the task is math-related, but not otherwise. Men choose similar avatar patterns regardless of the task. Men do perform at much higher levels in the math-related task, but there is no difference in performance in the emotion-recognition task, where there is a strong female stereotype.American University of SharjahUniversity of Exete