The impact of LBS research

The idea that working mothers leave their lucrative careers to gain more time with their families is a dominant narrative in the employment field, and women’s desire to resolve career-family conflict is often considered the main reason why they pursue entrepreneurship. This study explored an additional motivation driving female entrepreneurship: the motherhood penalty in the form of reduced earnings prospects that working mothers experience as a result of employer discrimination.

The researchers used matched employer and employee data from Sweden covering the entire working population – including details of occupation, pay and child status – to compare women who had children versus those who did not in the same organisation and doing the same job. Using this dataset, they were able to examine career mobility and in particular distinguish new-venture founding from self-employment. This enabled them to determine how many women turned to entrepreneurship after motherhood.  

The study found that reduced earnings opportunities in wage employment due to motherhood status is a key factor driving female entrepreneurship. Moreover, the larger the “earning penalty” (wage discrimination) that mothers experienced in the workplace, the more likely they were to leave their employer and start their own business. The findings also found that this response by mothers to wage discrimination is more pronounced for women in high-paying or managerial positions, given the higher opportunity cost of staying in wage work and the higher potential payoffs from entrepreneurship. By shedding light on the drivers of female entrepreneurship, the study contributes to a more thorough understanding of what motivates women to pursue irregular and atypical careers, such as entrepreneurship and the workplace wage discrimination impelling their choices.  

Calling someone a hypocrite has remained a common way to criticise them across time, culture and context. Hypocrites are seen as fickle and untrustworthy and allegations of hypocrisy can mean steep reputational costs. But people disagree over who is and is not a hypocrite – few believe themselves or their friends to be such, and pointing out ethical inconsistencies in others often fails to change their beliefs or behaviour. But why is this? In this paper we argue that one reason hypocrisy charges may fail to land is due to differing perceptions of comparability and the extent to which someone’s beliefs or behaviours seem inconsistent across different instances.

Calling someone a hypocrite typically entails invoking a comparison; one meant to highlight internal contradiction and cast moral character into question – yet there is ambiguity about which sorts of comparisons are valid in the first place. Through three experiments, we conceptualised and tested the role of perceived comparability in evaluating hypocrisy. We explored the idea that when people are motivated to attack their enemies, they search for points of comparison in their enemies actions in order to identify inconsistence. Conversely, when they are motivated to defend their allies, they reject the notion that their allies actions are comparable, thereby evading hypocrisy judgments. In essence, people tend to adjust their standards of comparability according to whether they view the person in question favourably or unfavourably.

Real-world morality is rife with complexity and no two situations are exactly alike. Our experiments identify an important role for perceived comparability in moral reasoning and help to explain why hypocrisy charges, despite their venom, might fail to make an impact. When motivated to attack, observers invoke comparisons to illustrate inconsistencies in a person’s beliefs or behaviour across different settings. Conversely, when motivated to defend, observers can delve into the details of scenarios and, because no two situations are perfectly alike, identify differences which justify believing that what might look like hypocrisy is really a case of apples and oranges – a fundamentally unreasonable comparison. This understanding can have broader implications for us in addressing conflicts and fostering more objective and fair assessments of moral behavior. The findings suggest that promoting awareness of perceived comparability and encouraging individuals to critically evaluate their biases could help mitigate disagreements about moral hypocrisy.

Women are under-represented in top management positions – such as in executive posts, entrepreneurship and science. A common explanation is that they exit talent pipelines at a faster rate than men. We also know that when men and women go after the same opportunity, and are rejected, women are much less likely than men to reapply for a similar position in the future. The challenge here is to understand the implications that this phenomenon will have for diversity in the long run.

Using a novel combination of formal mathematical modelling, with data from executive hiring, crowdfunding and patent applications, the researchers investigated long-term diversity outcomes and simulated the results of various scenarios. The model challenged the popular and obvious assumption that because women are not reapplying for opportunities, there will be fewer women in the pipeline in the long run. They found this only to be true in certain settings, and not even relevant in others. The results of the model helped them to scrutinise a popular intervention for lessening the gender gap: increasing the number of women in the application pool.

The results of the study were surprising. They suggest that convincing more women to reapply can actually backfire, as it can lead to higher rejection rates with fewer women in the application process in the long run. And in a sex bias analysis, they found that even unbiased rejection rates can yield large segregation effects. For a more effective approach to reducing gender disparities, lowering the rejection rate is paramount; and both for men and women. Surprisingly, this type of gender-neutral policy will result in increased diversity. This model plays a crucial role in evaluating diversity policies and opens up new avenues of research on women’s under-representation in the economy.