IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cdl/econwp/qt12j9d7c1.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Affirmative Action in Hierarchies

Author

Listed:
  • Scotchmer, Suzanne

Abstract

There is considerable evidence that males are more prone to take risks than females. This difference has implications for rates of promotion in hierarchies where promotion is based on random signals of ability. I explore the promotion consequences of three types of performance standards: gender-blind standards, standards designed to promote agents of equal ability on average, and standards designed to promote equal numbers of both genders. These three objectives lead to different promotion standards, which highlights among other things that the goal of affirmative action is not well defined. Lower promotion standards for females can be necessary to ensure either equal abilities or equal numbers in the promoted populations.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Scotchmer, Suzanne, 2003. "Affirmative Action in Hierarchies," Department of Economics, Working Paper Series qt12j9d7c1, Department of Economics, Institute for Business and Economic Research, UC Berkeley.
    • Handle: RePEc:cdl:econwp:qt12j9d7c1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/12j9d7c1.pdf;origin=repeccitec
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    labor markets; affirmative action; hierarchy; risk-taking; Social and Behavioral Sciences;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J7 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor Discrimination

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cdl:econwp:qt12j9d7c1. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Lisa Schiff (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ibbrkus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.