The Gender Concealment Gap

Christine L. Exley; Raymond Fisman; Judd B. Kessler; Louis-Pierre Lepage; Xiaomeng Li; Corinne Low; Xiaoyue Shan; Mattie Toma; Basit Zafar

doi:10.3386/w32350

The Gender Concealment Gap

Christine L. Exley, Raymond Fisman, Judd B. Kessler, Louis-Pierre Lepage, Xiaomeng Li, Corinne Low, Xiaoyue Shan, Mattie Toma & Basit Zafar

Working Paper 32350

DOI 10.3386/w32350

Issue Date April 2024

Revision Date August 2025

We identify and explore a gender concealment gap when individuals have the opportunity to hide information about their performance from others. In data from two universities that allowed students to replace letter grades with “credit” on their transcripts, we find that men are substantially more likely than women to conceal grades that will harm their GPAs. The gender concealment gap persists across student traits and course features and generates inequity: the option to conceal leads to GPA gains that are 50% larger for men than for women. University data and complementary experimental evidence suggests that women may conceal less because they expect others will make worse inferences about their concealed grades.

This paper previously circulated as "Information-Optional Policies and the Gender Concealment Gap". This paper supersedes material previously included in “The Transparency Gap” and “Anticipated Discrimination and Grade Disclosure”. We acknowledge the generous cooperation of the Boston University Registrar in obtaining the anonymized student transcript data. We thank Annabelle Finlayson, Tomer Mangoubi, John-Henry Pezzuto, and Emma Ronzetti for excellent research assistance. We thank numerous seminar and conference participants for valuable feedback and comments. This project was supported by the Harvard Business School, the Wharton School, the Wharton Analytics Initiative, and the Wharton Behavioral Lab. It was also supported through a Quartet Pilot Research award funded by the Boettner Center at the University of Pennsylvania. The content is solely the responsibility of the author(s) and does not necessarily represent the official views of Boston University, the University of Pennsylvania, the National Institutes of Health, or the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Basit Zafar
We would also like to thank the Registrar at the Midwestern Flagship University for providing access to the anonymized student transcript data, and for allowing us to the link those data to the student survey. The survey was financially supported by the University of Michigan.
MARC RIS BibTeΧ
- April 18, 2024
- October 15, 2024

The Gender Concealment Gap

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