Beliefs about Gender Inequalities, Narratives and Support for Gender Quotas

Gender quotas remain controversial despite evidence of their effectiveness in reducing labor-market gender inequality. We study how informational narratives about quotas affect support, and how effects depend on pre-existing causal beliefs about inequality. In a pre-registered survey experiment with 2,404 Italian workers and managers, we compare demand-side (discrimination, bias) versus supply-side (participation, confidence, role models) framings. All information increases unincentivized stated support, most strongly under demand-side narratives, but none affects the extensive margin of an incentivized donation, revealing a clear say–do gap. Conditional on donating, however, supply-side framing significantly raises amounts given. Open-ended responses show narratives reshape reasoning primarily among those with diffuse priors (generic cultural explanations). We formalize this in a simple model featuring misalignment costs and tail-driven effects: narrative success depends on the distribution of prior beliefs, which acts as a state variable determining optimal framing across contexts.