Gender Quotas and Task Assignment in Organizations

In response to the slow progress toward gender equality observed in the last decades, organizations and policy makers in many countries are increasingly looking at implementing quotas to close the gender gap. However, the expected benefits and potential drawbacks of such interventions are widely debated. We ran a laboratory experiment to investigate how gender quotas in hiring affect the allocation of workers into different tasks within an organization. 128 participants in the role of employers were asked to hire a team of six workers from a pool of 15 and assign them to one of two tasks which differed in complexity and profitability. Employers had information about workers’ age, gender, and university major as well as a signal of performance. Workers assigned to the Simple Task had to complete additions, while workers assigned to the Challenging Task had to solve mathematical problems. Although no gender difference was observable in the performance of either task, in the absence of quotas, high-ability women were both less likely to be hired and less likely to be assigned to the Challenging Task compared to high-ability men. With a quota of 50% female workers imposed on hiring, the number of women assigned to the Simple Task increased, while the number of those assigned to the Challenging Task remained significantly lower compared to men. Our findings suggest that gender quotas to increase the number of women hired may backfire, resulting in their more likely assignment to less-challenging, low-promotability tasks compared to men, and impairing their chances of career advancement. Moreover, we find that in the presence of a gender quota employers’ earnings are significantly lower, and that this is because they are more likely to hire lowability women. One explanation could be that gender quotas convey a message which suggests the overall low quality of the pool of female workers.