How do beliefs about the gender wage gap affect the demand for public policy?

Summary

Settele's 2022 research, "How Do Beliefs about the Gender Wage Gap Affect the Demand for Public Policy?", delves into the causal relationship between individuals' perceptions of the gender wage gap and their support for public policies designed to mitigate it. The study utilizes a meticulously designed survey experiment, which was pre-registered in the AEA RCT Registry (AEARCTR-0003252) and received ethics approval from Goethe University Frankfurt. The methodology involved exposing a sample, representative of the U.S. population, to randomized information treatments regarding the actual extent of the gender wage gap. This experimental approach allowed for the isolation of the causal effect of belief updates on policy preferences, covering a range of proposed government interventions over two stages, each with two waves of data collection. The findings demonstrate a clear causal link: individuals' updated beliefs about the gender wage gap significantly influence their demand for certain public policies. Specifically, when participants were informed of a larger wage gap, they showed a notably higher demand for stricter equal pay legislation and statutory affirmative action programs for women. This increased policy support was found to be primarily motivated by concerns about discrimination in labor markets and broader fairness considerations, rather than being driven by individual self-interest. However, the study also highlights a crucial limiting factor: pessimism regarding the general effectiveness of government intervention can dampen the responsiveness of policy demand, suggesting that even a strong belief in the existence of a wage gap may not translate into policy support if people doubt the government's ability to address it effectively. Despite the significant impact of beliefs on specific policy demands, the research concludes that these belief differences cannot fully account for the pronounced political polarization observed in policy views across partisan and gender lines. Furthermore, demand for other policies, such as gender quotas, internal company wage transparency, and public subsidies for childcare, was largely inelastic to the information provided in the experiment.