RSSE Ritwik Banerjee (IIM Bangalore) Affirmative Action and Application Strategies: Evidence from Field Experiments in Colombia

ABSTRACT: Affirmative action changes incentives at all stages of employment. In this paper, we study the effects of affirmative action statements in job ads on i) the effort expended on the application process and ii) the manifestation of emotions, as measured by the textual analysis of the content of the motivation letter. To this end, we use data from two field experiments conducted in Colombia. In the Control condition, women spend less time in the application process than men. Besides, female motivation letters exhibit lower levels of emotion, as measured by valence, arousal, and dominance. However, those differences vanish in the affirmative action treatment where we announce that half of the positions were reserved for women. In the Affirmative Action condition, the effort dedicated by women significantly increases and the motivation letters written by the female candidates show a significant increase in the expression of positive emotions. The results indicate that affirmative action policies can have significant encouraging effects on both effort and appeal of job applications of women, thereby reducing the gender gap in these outcomes.