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DONDENA Do.Re.Mee Seminar

Viola&Elena
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"Gender diversity and decision-making in teams" by Viola Salvestrini - Bocconi (with Maddalena Ronchi)

and

"Men and women’s employment status and union (in)stability: does contextual gender equality matter?" by Elena Bastianelli - Bocconi (with Cristina Solera and Daniele Vignoli)

 

 

PAPER 1 - "Gender diversity and decision-making in teams"

Speaker

Viola Salvestrini (Bocconi University)

Abstract

This paper investigates the effect of gender diversity in teams on their decision-making process and the quality of decisions.  We focus on the Italian judicial system and assemble a novel database containing the universe of collegial ruling sentences from first, second, and last instance criminal courts in the district of Naples and Florence. Exploiting the quasi-random allocation of both judges and cases to judicial panels, in which ruling takes place collegially, we find that mixed-gender teams rule more leniently on similar offenses. The effect is driven by all-women panels ruling more severely. Instead, we find that all-men teams take significantly less to reach a decision, but they are also more likely to be perceived as wrong when ruling guilty. Finally, we investigate whether gender diversity affects the quality of the final ruling as measured by the probability that the decision taken by the judicial panel is confirmed or overturned in subsequent courts and find that mixed-gender teams are more likely to take better decisions than gender-homogeneous teams. 

Bio

Viola Salvestrini is a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the AXA Research Lab on Gender Equality at Bocconi University. She is also a PhD candidate ​at Queen Mary University of London (expected 2024), under the supervision of Anna Raute and Francois Gerard. Her research interests lie in applied microeconomics, with a focus on gender economics, personnel economics, and labor economics.

 

 

PAPER 2 - "Men and women’s employment status and union (in)stability: does contextual gender equality matter?"

Speaker

Elena Bastianelli (Bocconi University)

Abstract

Gender theories agree that the role played by women and men’s employment status in the prediction of union dissolution depends on the level of gender equality in the society. Given its strong regional differences, Italy represents an excellent laboratory to study how variations in gender contexts influence the gendered relationship between employment status and union dissolution. We measured regional gender equality by means of an index comprising equality in three spheres: the labor market, the family, and the welfare context. By applying discrete-time event history models to nationally representative data, we estimated the probability of union dissolution for jobless and employed men and women across regions. Our results showed that, as contextual gender equality increases, differences by employment status diminish, and gender differences in the relationship between employment status and union dissolution virtually disappear – even in a country considered ‘traditional’ in terms of family and gender dynamics.

Bio

Elena Bastianelli is a social-demographer, mainly interested in family dynamics and social inequalities. She obtained a PhD in Sociology and Methodology of Social Research from the University of Turin and University of Milan (NASP) in May 2022 with a thesis on the relationship between employment instability and union dissolution in Italy. Since then, she has been a Post-doc in the Department of Statistics, Computer Science and Application of the University of Florence, and she joined Bocconi University in May 2023 to work on the Horizon Project FutuRes with Prof Arnstein Aassve.