Cluster-Seminar Public Finances and Living Conditions

The newspaper coverage of CEOs is highly gendered with more family-related language used in newspaper articles on female than male company leaders. In a randomized online experiment, we ask whether this stereotypical representation affects readers' beliefs about CEO competence, firm performance, and resulting financial decision-making. We show participants articles consisting of elements from real newspaper coverage on a real company and its CEO, and vary the way information about their family is (not) presented. We find that although respondents do not believe firm performance to be different by CEO coverage, investments into the firm stock are significantly lower for female CEOs when their family is neutrally mentioned. Instead, there is no penalty for highlighting a trade-off between family and career. Machine-learning analysis based on free-text questions suggests that family and gender play an important role in respondents' reasoning.