Men Are Less Responsive to Female Fed Messaging, Experimental Evidence Shows

Why Public Trust in Central Bankers Matters

Monetary policy effectiveness depends not only on technical decisions but also on the public’s confidence that central bankers are competent and committed to fighting inflation. Cristina Bodea and Andrew Kerner probe whether gender shapes those public expectations—an understudied factor given the historical rarity of female central bankers.

What Cristina Bodea and Andrew Kerner Did

The authors report a novel experiment that exposed members of the U.S. public to Federal Reserve communications that varied the apparent gender of the central banker and included signals meant to convey competence. The design isolates how gender cues in central bank messaging affect people’s economic optimism and trust in the Federal Reserve.

Key Findings

• There is sizable gender bias in responses to Fed messaging, with bias concentrated among men.
• Messages attributed to women central bankers were less successful at shifting men’s optimism about the economic future and their trust in the Fed compared to identical messaging attributed to men.
• Male respondents were disproportionately likely to fail to recognize that a central banker was female.
• Adding explicit competence signals did not reduce men’s bias against women central bankers, although those competence cues did increase the appeal of female central bankers among women respondents.

How the Study Measured Effects

• Randomized stimulus presentation of central bank communications that varied the speaker’s gender and competence cues.
• Outcome measures focused on expectations about the economy and institutional trust, plus an item assessing respondents’ perception of the speaker’s gender.

Implications for Scholarship and Practice

The findings suggest that gender can shape how publics receive central bank communication, with potential consequences for the transmission of monetary policy through expectations. For scholars, the results argue for incorporating gendered perceptions into models of public expectations; for institutions, the study highlights communication challenges that female central bankers may face and the limits of competence signaling in overcoming certain biases.