Faculty Research Grants

2004-2005 WAPPP Grants Overview

With the generous support of the Women's Leadership Board, WAPPP provided financial support for the gender-related research conducted by five Kennedy School faculty members. They are described below.

• Iris Bohnet
  Project Title: “Optimistic Men and Altruistic Women Provide Public Goods”
  Project Description: Iris Bohnet will use WAPPP funds to input, analyze and report data from her study examining how men and women differ in their voluntary provision of public goods. She and Fiona Greig, a PhD student at KSG, employed a novel experimental design to study women’s and men’s motivations to cooperate in Nairobi slums (and in follow-up studies, more generally) during the summer of 2004. They used an investment game to measure a person’s willingness to trust and be trustworthy, a public goods game to measure a person’s willingness to cooperate, and an extensive post-experimental questionnaire to control for demographic characteristics, attitudes and expectations, and past experiences. Preliminary evidence suggests that men’s willingness to contribute to the public good is mainly a matter of trust. They are more likely to cooperate when they are more optimistic about others’ cooperation levels. Women’s willingness to cooperate is also related to their trust to others; in addition, it is also related to their altruism. The more optimistic and the more altruistic women are, they more likely they are to cooperate.

• Hannah Riley Bowles
  Project Title: “How Do Women Attain Senior Leadership Positions?”
  Project Description: Hannah Riley Bowles will use WAPPP funds to explore the experiences of women who have achieved senior leadership positions and to compare and contrast their experiences across the entrepreneurial, corporate and public sectors. More specifically, her research focuses on how women negotiate for resources and opportunities to expand their authority within and beyond organizational boundaries. Together with Harvard Business School professor Kathleen McGinn, Hannah is in the process of conducting interviews with highly successful women entrepreneurs, senior corporate executives, cabinet-level political appointees and state-wide/federal/nationally elected officials. Thus far, they have conducted approximately 45 interviews; their goal is to interview 100 women, nearly evenly divided among the entrepreneurial, corporate and public sector. They plan to produce at least one academic article from the research by August 2005 and to write a book based on the interviews during the 2006-2007 academic year.

• Jane Mansbridge
  Project Title: “Everyday Feminism”
  Project Description: Jane Mansbridge will use WAPPP funds to complete her Everyday Feminism project. She currently has drafts of all fifteen chapters, but will do some final analysis on her quantitative chapters, perform additional fact-checking research, compile her bibliography, and finalize her conclusion. Mansbridge views Everyday Feminism as accomplishing the following:
  1) Introducing the concept of everyday activism to social movement (and practical) analysis, which has heretofore ignored action in this sphere.
  2) Promoting (and to some extent introducing) the idea that persuasion is as important as power in social change.
  3) As a corollary, introducing the idea that particular normative logics (e.g. the logic of formal justice) have a capacity independent of power (as the threat of sanction and use of force) to produce social change.
  4) Introducing the dynamic of organized activist variation and everyday activist selection as a way to explain some of the mechanics of social change through ideas.

• Pippa Norris
  Project Title: “The Impact of Electoral Systems on Women and Ethnic Minority Representation: Similarities and Contrasts”
  Project Description: Pippa Norris will use WAPPP funds for her research examining the impact of electoral systems on the descriptive representation of women and ethnic minorities, in order to identify the similarities and differences of policies designed to increase the diversity of legislative bodies. The core proposition to be explored will be that the impact of the basic type of proportional or majoritarian electoral system on ethnic minorities is not automatic; instead it will be contingent upon three main conditions: (a) the geographical distribution of the ethnic minority electorate, whether concentrated or diffuse; (b) the type of ethnic minority, whether a long-standing national minority or a more recent immigrant community; (c) the use of other positive action strategies, such as the employment of reserved seats or districting for minorities, or the use of statutory candidate quotas for women. The project will build on her previous publications, notably Electoral Engineering: Voting Rules and Political Behavior (2004), as well as the series of articles she has published since 1985 analyzing the impact on electoral systems on women’s representation.

• Richard Zeckhauser
  Project Title: “Why Do Female Physicians Earn less?”
  Project Description: One of the most important policy issues for women is that their earnings are significantly below those of men in equivalent positions and with equivalent backgrounds. Richard Zeckhauser will use WAPPP funds to investigate this issue for a single profession, physicians, for a single age group, under 40, and with a single practice pattern, self-employed. Together with Professor John Rizzo of Stony Brook University, Zeckhauser will use extremely detailed data from the Practice Patterns of Young Physicians Surveys to examine the earnings of physicians while controlling for numerous factors that are not part of most studies of the male-female earnings differential. Their analysis aims to find out why differences emerge, and subsequently to aid our understanding of why women earn less and how their earnings might be increased.
  
  
  
  

2003-2004 WAPPP Grants Overview

In 2003-2004, WAPPP provided financial support for the gender-related research conducted by seven Kennedy School faculty members. These are described below:

• Hannah Riley Bowles will conduct two studies that test the effects of implicit attitudes on gender and leadership emergence. The long-term aim of her research is to contribute to a broader research agenda on gender and the process of claiming authority, by helping to explain motivations for women holding back from asserting themselves into leadership positions in mixed-sex interactions.
• Nancy Katz and David Lazer will extend an existing project on the leadership of student teams to include gender issues. They will compare KSG student teams led by women and men during the MPP1 Spring Exercise, and address important questions regarding when and how women lead.
• Elizabeth Keating will examine retirement savings and the Family Economic Self-Sufficiency Standard (FESS), a project developed at Wider Opportunities for Women to calculate how much money working adults need to meet their basic needs without subsidies of any kind. She will identify existing studies of retirement savings in the US, focusing on the less well studied health of state and local governmental pension systems and the funding (or lack of funding) of pension plans and nonprofits and self-employed individuals.
• Michael Kremer will continue to research the large and growing phenomenon of immigrants finding employment in the domestic sector and other sectors traditionally dominated by women. He will examine the impact of this migration pattern on income distribution both across gender lines and skill levels. In addition, he will also study changes in female labor participation and fertility choice.
• Jane Mansbridge will investigate what she calls “micronegotiation” in everyday life and produce a book-length manuscript by June 2004. In particular, she will look at the use of persuasion and power in the negotiation of new concepts of gender justice.
• Mark Rosenzweig will design a project examining the relationship between development policies and investment in the human capital of women in low-income countries using a number of data sets from Bangladesh covering the past twenty years. Rosenzweig’s project will seek to understand the linkage between public policies and the increased investment in girls’ schooling.
• Guy Stuart will conduct a pilot project designed to assess the viability of gathering information on the role women play in managing the finances of households in villages in Andhra Pradesh. The project will produce data that identify the mechanics by which financial services, such as savings accounts, credit, and insurance, do or do not have an impact on the viability of a household.

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