Leadership and Gender Discrimination: Experimental Evidence from Ethiopia

Globally, women are underrepresented in top management. Using a novel “lab in the field” experiment in Ethiopia, we test whether leader gender influences the way subjects respond to leadership, and whether providing information about the leader’s underlying ability changes this gender gap. We find evidence for discrimination against female leaders when subjects are given no information about leader’s ability: subjects are less likely to follow female leaders. In contrast, when the leader is presented as highly trained and competent, the gender gap is reversed: subjects are more likely to follow women than men. The findings are consistent with a dynamic model of discrimination in which women are, on average, less likely to obtain signals of high ability. An implication of the model is that we should not observe gender discrimination among the highly educated in Ethiopia, where there are large gender gaps in educational attainment. Consistent with this, we demonstrate a lack of discrimination in a resume evaluation experiment for a management position. And, using a large sample of university administrative employees, we show that there is no gender wage gap among the highly educated.