Book Description

Women consistently face disadvantages in the workplace that result in lower competitive outcomes,such as lower pay and fewer leadership opportunities. A possible source of these disparities is bias from superiors who oversee promotions, raises, and other measures of professional success. However, because of difficulties separating this bias from other career factors such as experience, demands, and workplace dynamics, this source remains largely understudied. To fill this gap, we turn to high school debate as an alternative to model outcomes in competitive professional settings. First, we confirm that gender disadvantaged teams were more likely to lose against male opponents than their male counterparts, even when controlling for experience and school-level characteristics. Second, we found that little variation in win rates was explained by school-level or judge characteristics (experience and gender). Overall, we propose that much of the gender gap in win rates is explained by judge bias, which exists across varying judge characteristics. In the context of high school debate, our results show that initiatives solely aimed at diversifying judge gender or experience will fail to reduce disparities in win rates. Our findings also have implications for competitive settings in general: they align with a growing strand of literature suggesting that placing more women in leadership positions (the “add women and stir” approach) fails to improve outcomes for women overall. Additionally, we expand on a smaller vein of literature thatevaluates the role of experience in terms of moderating bias against women.