In applications, interviews, performance reviews, and many other environments, individuals are explicitly asked or implicitly invited to assess their own performance. In a series of experiments, we find that women rate their performance less favorably than equally performing men. This gender gap...

Women enter retirement having spent fewer years in market work, earned less over their lifetimes, and worked in different jobs than men of the same age. This study examines whether these differences in work-life experiences help explain why many women end up with lower levels of retirement...

Sex-related wage differentials are almost universal. Economists traditionally tend to attribute a major fraction of the differential to the difference in on-the-job training. This difference is in turn often explained by the lower profitability of this investment for women who plan to interrupt...

This paper uses IRS tax data to evaluate the short- and long-term effects of California's 2004 Paid Family Leave Act (PFLA) on women's careers. Our research design exploits the increased availability of paid leave for women giving birth in the third quarter of 2004 (just after PFLA was...

In most organizations, promotions often require self-nomination and competition among applicants. However, research on gender differences in preferences for competition suggests that this process might result in fewer women choosing to participate. We study whether changing promotion schemes...

This paper explores how the wage and career consequences of motherhood differ by skill and timing. Past work has often found smaller or even negligible effects from childbearing for high-skill women, but we find the opposite. Wage trajectories diverge sharply for high scoring women after, but...

Meaningful discussions about women at the top' can take place today only because a quiet revolution occurred about thirty years ago. The transformation was startlingly rapid and was accomplished by the unwitting foot soldiers of an upheaval that transformed the workforce. It can be seen in a...

Using detailed information on the career plans and earnings expectations of college business school seniors, we test the hypothesis that women who plan to work intermittently choose jobs with lower rewards to work experience in return for lower penalties for labor force interruptions. We find...