We examine whether an unsophisticated investor’s own gender interacts with gender of a sell-side equity analyst to affect the investor’s judgment. Prior research shows two potential sources of gender-based discrimination that affect female investors. First, female investors’ advisors offer less risky hence lower return portfolios to female investors than to male investors with similar risk preferences as female investors are perceived as more risk adverse. Second, female equity analysts are subject to greater barriers to enter and advance in investment firms that act as if they believe clients prefer male investment advisors in a male stereotypical occupation. Using two experiments, we use the judge-advisor framework to predict and find that investor’s gender and analyst’s gender jointly influence investor’s judgment. Specifically, female-female analyst-investor pair generates the strongest reaction to analyst’s advice compared to any other analyst-investor pair, everything else equal. Further, we find that efforts to highlight equal gender performance activates gender stereotypes that reduce female investors’ receptivity to female analysts’ advice. By linking the two previously different sources of discrimination we show that they reinforce each other and find that attempts to “level the playing field” by emphasizing gender performance parity may have unexpected results.

我们研究了一个单纯的投资者自己的性别是否会与卖方股票分析师的性别发生相互作用，从而影响投资者的判断。先前的研究表明，两种潜在的基于性别的歧视都可能影响女性投资者。首先，女性投资者的顾问提供的风险较小，因此与具有相似风险偏好的男性投资者相比，女性投资者的投资组合收益较低，因为女性投资者被认为对风险的不利程度更高。其次，女性股票分析师在进入和发展投资公司时会遇到更大的障碍，这些公司似乎认为客户在男性定型职业中更喜欢男性投资顾问。通过两个实验，我们使用法官-顾问框架来预测并发现投资者的性别和分析师的性别共同影响投资者的判断。具体来说，与其他任何分析师-投资人组合相比，女性-分析师-投资人组合对分析师建议的反应最强烈。此外，我们发现，强调性别平等表现的努力会激活性别刻板印象，从而降低女性投资者对女性分析师的建议的接受度。通过将先前两个不同的歧视源联系起来，我们表明它们相互加强，并发现通过强调性别绩效均等来“公平竞争”的尝试可能会产生意想不到的结果。