How can we work toward greater gender equality and women’s empowerment in OECD countries and emerging economies around the world? The OECD’s answer is focusing on the 3 “E”s: education, employment and entrepreneurship. Recent public policy initiatives such as the OECD Gender Recommendation and gender work by the G20 forum emphasize the importance of increasing female labor force participation to achieve strong and balanced growth. OECD’s Head of Social Policy Division, Monika Queisser reviews these recommendations and other initiatives in the OECD countries, and disseminates new findings that aim to achieve better representation of women in public sector leadership. Speaker: Monika Queisser, Head of Social Policy Division, Directorate of Employment, Labour and Social Affairs, OECD

than men, which has a significant impact on how they make decisions.

Exploring this topic, Alexandra van Geen runs a series of experiments to

evaluate under what conditions women and men are more or less willing

to take risks. Specifically, she examines whether women and men are more

likely to take risks when the financial reward is higher; if they are

sensitive to the presence of other risks in the decision environment; or

whether winning in the past makes them more likely to take risk in the

future. She finds stark gender differences, including that men greatly

increase risk taking after winning a lottery, while women do not.

Investigating how, when and why men and women respond differently in

risky environments can help close the gender gap in risk taking.

and gender-based violence in conflict research and in international

advocacy, there has been little systematic analysis of how

organizational power structures and local contexts inform the nature and

dynamics of such violence. WAPPP Fellow, Zoe Marks, examines the

intersecting dynamics of power and gender in armed groups in Africa by

using her extensive research conducted on the Revolutionary United Front

(RUF) in Sierra Leone. Her study analyzes how context and power affect

the dynamics of sexual and gender-based violence by looking at when and

how women obtain power in armed groups and what their power tells us

about the politics of violence. Speaker: Zoe Marks, WAPPP Fellow, 2014; Chancellor's Fellow, Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh

and ensure their children have a good start in life. Often, the chance

to start a business or get a job is the surest way to accomplish this

goal. But how can we be sure that women have the same opportunities as

men to fulfill their economic potential? The World Bank Group's Women,

Business and the Law project presents a unique dataset examining how the

law can help or impede women from working and earning an income and

what can be done to improve women's economic rights.

dynamics of groups with minority duos (such as two women in a group of

men). Though many believe that it is worse to be the “only one” in a

group, this work finds that men evaluate women more stereotypically when

they are in a duo than when there are one or three in a group. In fact,

women in duos are rated as contributing less leadership and having

fewer skills. In three experimental studies, Loyd looks at how being

part of a minority duo can present significant challenges for women.

explanation is that women’s family obligations conflict with long hours

of jobs, hampering their advancement into senior organizational

positions. The commonly championed solution has been policies offering

flexible work arrangements designed to mitigate such conflict. Yet

research shows that men, too, experience work-family conflict. Moreover,

work-family policies do little to help women or men’s workplace

advancement, and in fact, often hurt them. In this presentation, Ely

draws from her in depth case study of a global professional service firm

to ask why the belief that work-family conflict lies at the heart of

women’s stalled advancement persists. She explores how this popular

narrative self-perpetuates despite evidence to the contrary, and how

organizations use this narrative as an explanation for women's blocked

mobility partly because it diverts attention from the broader problem of

a long-hours work culture among professionals. Speaker: Robin Ely, Professor of Business Administration and Senior Associate Dean, Harvard Business School

Gender inequality in workplaces and in homes around the globe reflects individual attitudes and abilities, intra-household bargaining and legal and socio-cultural influences. Research that considers factors across the individual, household and cultural levels simultaneously is essentially nonexistent. This paper explores how gender attitudes are shaped by the national context, how these shape intra-household bargaining, and how women’s and men’s lives at work and at home are altered in the process. Speaker: Kathleen McGinn, Cahners-Rabb Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School

Why do some armed groups commit massive wartime rape, while others never do? Using an original dataset, I describe the substantial variation in rape by armed actors during recent civil wars and test a series of competing causal explanations. I find evidence that the recruitment mechanism is associated with the occurrence of wartime rape.

Specifically, the findings support an argument about wartime rape as a method of socialization, in which armed groups that recruit by force— through abduction or pressganging—use rape to create unit cohesion. I examine observable implications of the argument, based on months of fieldwork, in case studies of the conflicts in Sierra Leone, El Salvador and Timor-Leste, and consider some of the longterm consequences of conflict-related mass rape. Speaker: Dara Kay Cohen, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School

This paper examines whether social stigma or peer sanctions associated with academic achievement or effort adversely affects girls’ school performance (in absolute terms, or relative to boys). The effects of the introduction of a point system and “leaderboard” into computer-based math and English courses in high schools in California revealed previously hidden information, namely who the top performers were in the class. This study finds that the system led to a very large decline in performance for students who were at the top of the class prior to introduction (those most “at risk” of being in the leaderboard), and a smaller increase in performance for students at the bottom of the class. Despite results from previous studies on stigma and performance, this study finds no differences in these effects between boys and girls in either English or math. The net effect of the point system and leaderboard worsen overall performance. Speaker: Robert Jensen, Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy, University of Pennsylvania

Although women have made great in attaining positions of power in recent decades, there still remains barriers to women in not only continuing to attain these positions, but also in maintaining them. Women face different challenges than men in the quest for leadership roles and their ability to hold onto these positions. For women, power can still be hard to earn, difficult to signal to others (once power is attained), and, in certain circumstances, easy to lose. Gender stereotypes—our beliefs about what men and women are like—continue to shape our perceptions of women and can ultimately impede women’s progress in gaining, exercising, and maintaining power and leadership. My research on women and the precariousness of their power has examined women in top leadership roles (e.g., the United States Senate), experiments in the lab, and interviews with women who have managed to navigate the challenges of being in leadership positions. Speaker: Victoria Brescoll, WAPPP Fellow; Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior, Yale School of Management