ABSTRACT:
Are women more likely to shy away from competitive and uncertain environments when considering information technology (IT)-related work options, relative to men? Does gender play a role in the propensity to participate in the marketplace for competitive and uncertain work? The response to this has implications for understanding the participation rate of women within the IT sector, as well as for setting policy aimed at increasing the number of women in the IT industry. Addressing this question using data from organizations is difficult, given the presence of organizational and institutional confounds. In this paper, we investigate this research question through a series of lab experiments using three sets of suitable subjects: graduate students in Information Systems and Business Analytics programs, MTurk, and Prolific respondents with IT backgrounds. Using the experimental context of a competitive online labor market, we study how competition and wage uncertainty affect the decision to bid for a project as well as the wage expectations across gender. Our results across three studies show that (a) women are more likely to bid for projects with higher coordination needs: navigating, communicating across, and managing multiple domains, technological, functional, and geographical boundaries; and (b) women are also more likely to bid when there is higher competition. Our work contributes to a deeper understanding of the role of gender, competitiveness, and uncertainty within the IT industry, and informs managers and policymakers regarding the intrinsic preferences of early-stage IT professionals.
Key words and phrases: Gender, IT labor markets, randomized experiments, business competition, technological complexity, wage uncertainty, coordination