WiE Brown Bag Seminar - March

Join us for our third session of the WiE Brown Bag Seminar in 2026 featuring Marita Freimane, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Zurich and a Visiting Researcher at WZB Berlin.

Gender Bias, Feedback, and Productivity

Abstract: 

I study how gender-biased feedback affects worker productivity in an online labor market. I focus on content creators, an increasingly important group of online workers, and show that female creators received more negative feedback than male creators for comparable content. This gap disappeared after YouTube removed public dislike counts. Using detailed data on videos and channels and a difference-in-differences design, I find that the reduction in negative feedback led to a lasting increase in both the productivity of female creators and demand for their content. After the change, women produced 8.4 percent more videos and saw a 15.5 percent larger increase in demand than men. The decline in negative feedback was driven…