IEA: Can you tell us what made you pursue a career in economics?

Seda: I did not have much idea of the range of things economists could study when I entered the undergraduate program in economics—I honestly thought it would be exchange rates and inflation and the stock market. As someone who was always broadly interested in psychology and curious about human behavior, I was pleasantly surprised when I saw that economics gave you a way of understanding and modeling individuals’ actions in a variety of interesting contexts. I realized that there were many questions at the intersection of economics and psychology that interested me, and felt that exploring those questions was something I wanted to do. During my PhD at UCLA, I started with theoretical modeling and (lab) experimental tests of beliefs about the self and effort behavior (how individuals’ effort responds to relative performance feedback, and how we process information that is relevant to
our ego). I then had the chance to branch out into field experiments and neuroeconomics during my postdoctoral studies at the University of Chicago. In recent years, I have been studying the formation of preferences in childhood, and designing interventions to improve non-cognitive skills in the educational environment. I am very happy that the work I do as an economist has policy implications and can play a role in improving educational and gender outcomes.

IEA: A lot of your work focuses on gender differences in diverse areas such as education, negotiations,
teams, and leadership. Can you briefly tells us about a couple of your findings that surprised you.

Seda: I have tried to answer three types of questions in my work on gender: 1) in what contexts do gender differences exist?, 2) what are the reasons for these differences?, 3) what can we do to mitigate inefficient gender gaps? As regards the first question, it was quite interesting for me to see that women tend to be reluctant to take on the decision-making role in group contexts (Ertac and Gurdal, 2012), which is likely to be one of the reasons why we see so few women in leadership contexts. This actually turned out to be a quite robust finding and was corroborated in further studies that use this setup (e.g., Alan et al. (2020)). As regards the second question, it was one of the most interesting experiences of my life to visit the tribes of Northeast India, where we found that in matrilineal societies, gender gaps that appear around puberty in patriarchal societies never emerge, which points to the role of socialization (e.g., Andersen et al. (2013)). In terms of what can be done to mitigate the gaps, one interesting insight has come from the educational interventions we have conducted in Turkey: when we teach children about the role of effort and persistence in achievement, girls become more optimistic about their future performance, and the well-documented gender difference in competitiveness disappears (Alan and Ertac, 2019)).