Does leader gender matter for performance evaluations? Evidence from two experiments

Public evaluations of organizations and their leaders are core features of public management used to foster accountability. Yet, prior research suggests that evaluations can be unduly influenced by leaders’ personal attributes and social identities, such as those signalled by gender. We examine these expectations using preregistered vignette experiments that vary the manager’s gender and level of performance in two distinct settings: education and policing. Results across both studies suggest women and men public managers are evaluated similarly overall; however, we find that the organizational context and identity of the evaluator likely play a role in evaluations of public managers.