Are Women Nicer? To Each Other?

A bit of self-promotion: in a recent paper, Jason Abrevaya and I examined whether female economists are less likely to say no when making recommendations on publishing papers, and whether they favor female authors.  With lots of fancy econometric adjustments on a huge amount of data, we found no evidence that women are nicer in general; nor are they nicer to each other than to male economists.
This seems in contrast to many laboratory findings.  Maybe that is because the more important people consider the context to be, the less favoritism/discrimination is exhibited.  Or, perhaps, as in my work on baseball, when there’s a greater cost of being perceived as unfair by others—of being exposed as discriminatory—people behave more even-handedly.