Econometrica · 2026 · Rocco Macchiavello、Andreas Menzel、Atonu Rabbani、Christopher Woodruff
中文摘要
女性在晋升管理职位方面仍处于劣势。我们在孟加拉国24家大型服装厂开展了一项实地实验，以检验女性在生产线主管中是否存在低效的代表性不足。我们识别出主管职位的边际女性和男性候选人，并随机分配他们管理生产线。我们记录了四项发现：（1）与基线时普遍存在的对女性担任主管能力的负面看法相反，工厂选出的女性候选人与男性具有相似的技能；（2）在试验期间，女性的表现劣于男性，我们表明这与针对她们的负面偏见有关；（3）然而，在试验结束后，许多女性候选人被留任为主管，并且在此条件下，其表现与男性相似；（4）在我们的干预结束后，工厂永久性地提高了女性在新任命主管中所占的比例。一个关于歧视实验的概念框架可以解释所有这些事实，并对检验歧视的标准逻辑提出警示：当被歧视群体的表现存在不确定性时，该群体边际候选人相等——甚至更差——的表现不再足以排除无效率的歧视。
Abstract
Women remain disadvantaged in promotion to managerial positions. We conduct a field experiment with 24 large garment factories in Bangladesh to test for inefficient representation of women among line supervisors. We identify the marginal female and male candidates for supervisory positions and randomly assign them to manage production lines. We document four findings: (1) In contrast to widespread negative beliefs about women's ability as supervisors at baseline, female candidates selected by the factories had similar skills to males; (2) during the trial, females performed worse than males, which we show is related to negative bias against them; (3) after the trial, however, many female candidates were retained as supervisors and, conditional on that, performed similar to males; and (4) after the end of our intervention, factories permanently increased the share of women among newly appointed supervisors. A conceptual framework of experimentation over discrimination rationalizes all these facts and cautions against the standard logic to test for discrimination: when there is uncertainty about the performance of the discriminated group, equal—or even worse—performance of the marginal candidates of that group is no longer sufficient to rule out inefficient discrimination.