Bridging the gender-career gap: a field experiment

According to the Gender Equality Index, Italy ranks lowest in the work domain among European countries (EIGE, 2024a). The gender leadership gap, characterized by the underrepresentation of women in high-level career and leadership positions, remains widespread across various life domains, including politics, academia, and business (EIGE, 2024b). To address this issue, this study tested an intervention designed to reduce implicit and explicit gender stereotypes and modern sexism in a randomized control trial (Calanchini et al., 2021; Forscher et al., 2017). At T1 (N= 98), we assessed explicit stereotypes on female careers (vs family) with two 7-point Likert Scales, and implicit gender-career stereotypes using the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald et al., 1998). We also included a measure of modern sexism (Modern Sexism Scale, Swim et al., 1995). The intervention was proposed to the experimental group immediately after the dependent variables were measured. It asked participants to express their emotional reaction to the IAT Score feedback, followed by an informative section about stereotypes and gender bias, and a role modeling strategy to be implemented during the following week. At T2 (N = 90, one week after T1), we provided participants with the same measures used at T1 for evaluating sexism and both implicit and explicit stereotypes. Our results showed that men exhibited higher scores at the modern sexism scale than women (t = 2.944, p < .01, d = .632), while women exhibited higher levels of explicit stereotypes (t = 2.174, p < .05, d = .435). These results have been consistently observed in the literature and have sometimes been referred to as self-stigma (Crocker & Major, 1989). Trivial gender differences were observed at the IAT (t = 1.274, p = .103, d = .274).