Some events should be marked on the calendars of everyone doing research in labor. The Workshop on Labor Economics organized by the IAAEU in Trier is among them. The Workshop is characterized by a friendly atmosphere, a very engaged audience, and an amazing program covering recent developments across different areas of labor economics. Certainly, there is something for everyone, from experiments -like ours- to counterfactual policy evaluation and structural models.

At this workshop we presented our experiment on the use of external reviewers to assess ability of candidates in the search of possible gender biases. Being able to obtain unbiased assessments is a key component of every affirmative action aimed at improving gender inequality, without sacrificing efficiency. To verify whether external reviewers were unbiased we run an experiment within Polish academia, where participants assess the competences of several candidates, whose differed only on their gender. Participants also indicates whether candidates should be invited for an interview. Importantly, these candidates were real (though anonymized), and the evaluations helped to assess real recruitments.

Results demonstrate that gender did not play a role in the evaluation. Not only average scores are identical across genders, we also observe a significant overlap over the entire distribution! Moreover, providing information on diversity policies enacted by the university had no effect on competence assessment. This finding suggests that these policies were not consider by the participants, which creates room for their implementation.

We  thank all participants for making a great conference, and particularly to Patrick Nuess, and Nicolas  Ziebarth for their comments. And of course, a big shout out to the organizers. Hopefully next year we will meet again!