Health Services, Systems and Policy Seminar Series: Discrimination and Audience Evaluations

Speaker: Dr. Bryan Stroube, London Business School  

Abstract: Research finds that status characteristics such as gender are frequently related to quality evaluations by various external audiences. Yet little is known about whether such characteristics are also related to the level of consensus in quality evaluations. We examine 380 million film ratings by consumers to assess 1) whether female-led movies elicit more or less consensus in quality evaluations than male-led movies, and 2) the potential performance consequences for producers. We find that despite lower ratings on average, female-led movies elicit ratings distributions with higher standard deviations and more positive skew. This effect stems in part from how subsets of men and subsets of women differentially rate female-led movies compared to male-led movies. We also find evidence that producing female-led movies is a profitable and increasingly prevalent strategy for independent studios who target niche audiences. The talk will conclude by making connections between the wider gender effects on audience evaluations literature and the healthcare literature and investigating how insights gleaned from this study can help us understand discrimination in the healthcare domain.