Introduction

The gender gap in the labour market exist whether you measure it by wages or promotions to name a few. Galor and Weil (1996) mention negative consequences of this is being “economic growth and fertility.” In this area of researching their have been several papers all with different hypothesis’s to explain why. The more recent being Niederle and Vesterlund (2007) stating that “women shy away from competitive workplaces whereas men desire , and even thrive in.”

This is what Flory et al article offers. Providing evidence on the extent to which these findings predict behaviour in naturally occurring labour marketing’s and what the economic consequences are. Advancing it by analysing subjects in a natural labour market making economic choices. The difference with it being in a field experiment is the loosening of the degrees of controls over factors which in a normal laboratory experiment be easily to manipulate. So able to provide more realistic insight into the question where laboratory settings are unrealistic, through manipulations in the field, able to examine whether persisting gender gap in labour markets can be accredited to a certain degree by different compensation regimes.

To test this they conduct two natural field experiment on job entry decisions. Posting two versions of an online advertisement and randomized interested jobseekers into different compensation regimes. Each job seeker then makes the decision whether to ultimately. Comparing application patterns for the two versions of position makes it possible to establish the relevance of task-dependence and gender-job associations. The second experiment explores an mechanism behind gender specific employment patterns which is gender – job associations. This was emphasized by Akerlof and Kranton (2000) who used mechanism to predict “that women sort into employments whose requirements match construed female attributes.” More recent papers suggest different responses by men and women to competition may depend partly on the tasks performed like Shurchkov (2012) who found “men are much more willing to compete in the lab when using a math task disappears when switching to a verbal task suggesting gender-task stereotypes drive such gender differences”. So second experiment sees whether minor adjustments in the position, affect each gender’s response to the contract environment.