Top Highlights

• When you’re deciding whether to motivate someone, you should first think about whether your incentive might crowd out the willingness to perform well without an incentive
• Personally, we think that much of it boils down to this: men and women have different preferences for competitiveness, and they respond differently to incentives. Our research shows that many women tend to avoid competitive settings and jobs in which salary is determined by relative rankings.
• To combat it, the person who is targeted for unfair treatment needs to signal that he or she is like those people who are not being discriminated against.
• If a graduate admissions team at a university doesn’t admit a talented black woman because, all else being equal, it simply doesn’t like her race and gender, then a “reverse discrimination” policy such as Affirmative Action is probably a good solution. But if the reason for not admitting her is based on economic discrimination—for example, if the a...
• Our research suggests the old policy-making tools to combat modern-day discrimination in the labor market, such as hiring quotas and Affirmative Action are antiquated and misguided because they don’t deal with the real problems of discrimination today. Rather, they deal with the wrong type of discrimination, not the one that is prevalent and growin...