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what would happen if our options were blind hi I'm Renee Adams I'm a professor of finance at site Business School at the University of Oxford and I'm a co-author on this paper called its gender and the eye of the beholder and if identifying the effect of cultural attitudes using art auction prices so when women experience worse outcomes in the labor market than men often people argue that it's the woman's fault and what we show that it's not the woman's fault it's actually society's fault so culture really matters what we did in this paper is we tried to look at whether women have different outcomes in the art market than men do and basically what we did is we took a large sample of art auction prices and we showed that women experienced a discount relative to men that fairly large discount so standard stories why women may experience a gender wage gap in other settings are for example that women don't negotiate well women are less connected maybe women don't have the same talent as men these are all standard stories that people use in order to explain why women have different outcomes and different pay relative to men and so we looked at these questions also in the context of art and we argue that none of these explanations can explain this big discount the art market turns out to be an excellent setting for exam and gender effects because particularly in the secondary art market it's all about the demand for an artist painting not about any characteristics of the artist or the artists ability to influence the sale so you really are able to have a clean setting to identify the potential role of culture in the outcomes experienced by women we try to rule out that women paint different types of paintings and men paint so it's a it's a style effect so we're able to do that we use some text analysis of painting titles and looking at the topics of paintings and we show that even when you control for the the style of the painting there's big discount for paintings painted by women we also show that if a woman sells paintings in different countries then the discount for paintings relative to paintings painted by men is bigger in countries where there's more gender inequality and so what that suggests is it's not anything specific to the artist that explains the price differential is really something about culture so I guess the punchline of our paper is that to some extent gender is in the eye of the beholder right which is the the title of our paper so it's not just the quality of the artwork that matters for the price that people are willing to pay for it gender also matters what's really important is awareness so there's a lot of evidence that when people become aware of their biases that they change the behavior and so that's exactly why we wrote this paper it's the raise awareness