Stereotypes and Belief Updating

Abstract

Abstract We explore how feedback shapes, and perpetuates, gender gaps in self-assessments. Participants in our experiment take tests of their ability across different domains. We elicit their beliefs of their performance before and after feedback. We _nd that, even after the provision of highly informative feedback, gender stereotypes in_uence posterior beliefs, beyond what a Bayesian model would predict. This is primarily because both men and women update their beliefs more positively in response to good news when it arrives in a more gender congruent domain (i.e. more male-typed domains for men, more female-typed domains for women), fueling persistence in gender gaps.