A comment on "Gender Differences in Climbing up the Ladder: Why Experience Closes the Ambition Gender Gap"

Wald et al. (2024) find that women are less likely than men to go after top leadership roles mainly early in their careers, not because they lack ability, but because they lack experience and confidence. Using nearly a century of U.S. political data, the researchers showed that women with little experience were less likely than men to run for high office, but this gender gap disappeared once women gained enough experience. An experiment confirmed why this happens: experience boosts women's self-confidence, which in turn makes them just as willing as men to pursue high-level positions. Overall, the study claims that giving women opportunities to gain experience is a key to close the gender gap in ambition and leadership pursuit. We first assess computational reproducibility and successfully reproduce all main results from Study 1 (Model 1 in Table 2 and robustness models in Tables S2 and S3) and all preregistered results from Study 2 using the authors' replication package, starting both from raw data and from analysis data, with no discrepancies in sign, magnitude, or statistical significance. We then conduct a robustness reproducibility analysis for Study 1 using a multiverse framework. A joint Wald test of the experience-gender interaction terms confirms the original claim, rejecting the null hypothesis of no differential effect of experience by gender (.2 (2) = 10.5313, p . 0.0052). Across alternative specifications that vary the functional form of experience (quadratic vs. dummy variables), the treatment of calendar time (linear vs. dummy variables), and the subset of years included (all vs. even years only), the main claim replicates in 15 out of the 16 tests performed. The test for which the main claim was no longer significant was that for which analyses were restricted to even election years (to address irregularities in the temporal structure of U.S. elections) and both experience and calendar year were entered as dummy variables. Study 2 was not subjected to robustness reproduction; its preregistered experimental results are computationally reproducible and match the published findings precisely. Overall, the core claim that experience closes the gender gap in political ambition is computationally reproducible and robust across most plausible specifications, with the exception being that which restricts the sample (to account for the uneven temporal distribution of elections, a critical attribute given their occurrence in uneven years) and inputs alternative specifications of both experience and calendar year. This underscores the need for more in-depth analysis in future research that extends the original study.