Economics Seminar - Do Women Overprepare? An Experiment (joint work with Cosima Steck and Humberto Llavador)

Despite the progress achieved, career and workplace equality for women and men is still not realized. This holds in all areas, but especially in STEM fields. In explaining this observation, the literature mainly focuses on identifying gender differences in career-relevant behavior, such as, among others, the confidence gap, risk aversion, or the imposter phenomenon. Some studies implicitly link these behavioral patterns with a real and felt need for women to be better prepared than comparable men, affecting their career planning and motivation to pursue higher-level jobs. However, current research lacks experimental methods to identify and measure overpreparation effectively.