Visiting Speaker: Laura Boudreau, Columbia Business School
Presentation Title: "Social Norms and Worker Productivity" (joint with Sakib Mahmood and Oren Reshef)
Abstract:
Traditional cultural norms around the separation of the sexes and superiority of men to women are defining features of many developing economies. We argue these norms generate frictions in transitioning society workplaces in which the genders are mixing for the first time. Specifically, we argue that men and women prefer to avoid communication, that men prefer not to be instructed by women, and that social enforcement is important for maintaining these norms. We provide microeconometric evidence from two field experiments with Bangladeshi sweater factories. In a survey experiment, we elicit workers’ willingness to pay (accept) to receive (share) productivity-enhancing information from (with) a co-worker when the match is socially compatible or incompatible. Both sexes are less willing to pay (WTP) to learn from the other sex, but the effect is particularly strong for men; men are WTP 14.4% more to learn from men when interactions are publicly observable, and this falls to 8% when interactions are more private. Both sexes are willing to teach the opposite sex. We quantify the downstream effects on workers’ productivity in an experiment that randomizes whether a subset of men or women are provided with technical skills training. When men are trained, awareness and adoption of the skills among their male and female coworkers are similar. When women are trained, their male coworkers are less aware of the skills than female coworkers, adopt them less in the short-run, and only catch up in the longer-run. Results on workers’ productivity and a novel individual technology adoption tracking system are coming soon.
Host: Niharika Singh