Do Women Receive Less Blame Than Men? Attribution of Outcomes in a Prosocial Setting

We examine gender biases in the attribution of leaders’ outcomes to their choices versus luck. Leaders make unobservable investment choices that affect the payoffs of group members. High investment is costly to the leader but increases the probability of a good outcome (high payoff). We observe gender biases in the attribution of bad outcomes. Bad outcomes of male (female) leaders are attributed more to their decisions (luck). These biases are driven by male evaluators and evaluators who are prosocial. We find no gender differences in the attribution of good outcomes. We conjecture that benevolent sexism may be driving our results