Does society underestimate women? Evidence from the performance of female jockeys in horse racing

Brown, Alasdair and Yang, Fuyu (2015) Does society underestimate women? Evidence from the performance of female jockeys in horse racing. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 111. 106–118. ISSN 0167-2681

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Abstract

Women are under-represented in many top jobs. We investigate whether biased beliefs about female ability - a form of ‘mistake-based discrimination’ - are partially responsible for this under-representation. We use more than 10 years of data on the performance of female jockeys in U.K. and Irish horse racing - a sport where, uniquely, men and women compete side-by-side - to evaluate the presence of such discrimination. The odds produced by the betting market provide a window onto society's beliefs about the abilities of women in a male-dominated occupation. We find that women are slightly underestimated, winning 0.3% more races than the market predicts. Female jockeys are underestimated to a greater extent in jump racing, where their participation is low. We discuss possible reasons for this association.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This article is open access and published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Uncontrolled Keywords:	gender,glass ceiling,discrimination,horse racing
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Economics
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Applied Econometrics And Finance
Depositing User:	Pure Connector
Date Deposited:	06 Feb 2015 10:30
Last Modified:	20 Oct 2022 22:31
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/51720
DOI:	10.1016/j.jebo.2014.12.031

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