This research explores how social disconnectedness uniquely impacts women's creativity. While social disconnectedness (i.e. loneliness) is typically perceived as detrimental, it can also help set individuals free of societal conformist influences. Integrating loneliness research with gender role theory, we hypothesize that social disconnectedness can reduce the influences of women’s traditional gender roles that prescribe conformity and norm compliance, thus enhancing women's creativity. In comparison, social disconnectedness is expected to have less pronounced impact on men’s creativity as their gender roles already emphasize independence and nonconformity. Using a time-lagged, multisource field study of assembly line workers (n = 188) where we collected real employees’ creative ideas relevant to the workplace, we found that social disconnectedness enhanced creativity for women, but not for men. We conducted follow-up qualitative interviews that produced insights into the underlying, gender-specific mechanism. We then conducted an experiment (n = 200) where we independently manipulated workplace social disconnectedness and participant gender. Results showed that social disconnectedness enhanced women’s (but not men’s) creativity via increasing non-conformity. This research challenges the prevailing negative view of social disconnectedness and presents a functional perspective where it can help women overcome traditional limitations and express their creativity.

Experimental evidence shows that men earn more than women in majoritarian negotiations. Three stylized modes of behavior emerge as potential reasons for the gap: Men sort into making opening offers more often, prefer to partner with other men, and when partnering with each other, their coalitions are more stable compared to mixed-gender ones. We design three experimental interventions to investigate the explanatory role each channel plays in the emergence of the gap and, consequently, provide potential solutions. We find that enabling everyone to simultaneously make an initial proposal does not close the earnings gap, if anything, it weakly grows in magnitude. Hiding gender eliminates bias in coalition partner choice and alters bargaining dynamics, thereby equalizing mean earnings. Finally, allowing for commitment in bargaining closes the gap because mixed-gender coalitions become more stable. Our results highlight how the attributes of the negotiation environment interact with gender and suggest that the design of bargaining institutions can be leveraged to promote gender equity.

Rating ambiguity, defined as the divergence of multiple ratings across different agencies, is often considered a problem for audience members because existing research assumes that they use ratings for evaluation purposes and rating ambiguity makes products hard to evaluate. We extend this literature by theorizing the conditions under which audience members may welcome rating ambiguity: they use it to rationalize controversial decisions to appear simultaneously congruent with incompatible institutional demands. We analyze a panel dataset comprising 7,248 stocks across 67 countries between 2006 and 2021, focusing on green stocks and sin stocks that exemplify a persistent trade-off between financial returns and sustainability in the context of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing. We find that ESG rating ambiguity increases ESG investor holding in sin stocks, an effect strengthened by the maximum score of the multiple ratings. Conversely, it decreases ESG investor holding in green stocks, an effect strengthened by the minimum score. Our findings remain consistent after using a difference-in-differences analysis based on a regulatory shock, addressing a key alternative explanation (i.e., ESG investors prefer financial returns as a non-ambiguous criterion to ambiguous ESG ratings), and using different measures and rating coverages.