The company provides sales agents with a chat interface to interact with customers. Customers can initiate interactions with sales agents by clicking on a chat button at the bottom of the webpage. Clicking the chat button reveals a chat window displaying the agent’s first name and a short greeting message. Thus, agents always send the first message; either the agent or the customer can send subsequent messages as the conversation evolves.

The company was keen to partner with the research team to investigate whether they could optimize this chat/sales interface. This particular test aimed to identify how customer behavior changed with respect to agents’ identities—specifically when agents were assigned male- versus female-sounding names. To this end, the company needed to (1) randomize whether the name appearing in the chat implied a male or female identity and (2) ensure agents were unaware of their assigned names. The randomization was correctly implemented: a software program pulled one name per sales agent per day from an existing list. The agent then received the drawn name within the chat/sales interface. A local field team compiled the list of names by drawing 1,198 names from local school yearbooks and assigned each name an implied gender and ethnicity.<sup>12</sup> To limit the customers’ inference of other dimensions of agents’ identities besides gender, the interface only included agents’ (randomly assigned) first names.

Next, to ensure that agents could not see the names that were assigned to them, a web plugin was designed to omit the agent’s name from the agent-facing interface. The company installed the plugin on each agent’s internet browser with oversight from our field team. The plugin symbol was removed from the list of visible extensions—appearing as a light grey square when all browser extensions were listed. Agents did not inquire about the plugin throughout the duration of the experiment. The plugin worked in the following way. Consider a day when agent _James_ (real name) was assigned the name _Steve_ . Whenever the customer typed “Steve” into the chat, James would only see “Agent” in his chat window. In contrast, the client would still see “Steve.” This name masking included any references to the agent’s assigned name in the chat transcript.<sup>13</sup> The experiment was launched in January 2019 and the name assignment continued until October 2019. The company had full discretion over which agents participated in the study. They included all five agents based in the East African office, and one agent from the West Africa branch. The company informed agents that it was interested in learning more about how customers respond to different agents, and may change agents’ display name in the chat. No further information about the nature or the objectives of the experiment was provided by the company, including the focus on gender. Agents did not ask any follow up questions throughout the duration of the experiment, and the company made no additional requests of agents (in terms of protocols/procedures to follow). It is unlikely that knowledge of the experiment would have affected agents’ behavior as the study was never discussed in

> 12 Of the 1,198 names, there are 1,196 unique full names, and 579 unique first names. Table A1 lists 20 example names, by gender. We do not have access to data sources like birth certificate records or a census to validate how common these names are for men or women.

> 13 The vast majority of interactions occurred in English, limiting concerns about gendered identifiers. Other gendered identifiers like “Sir” or “Miss” are rarely used in 1.3% of chats, and section 4 shows the results are unaffected by excluding any days when this occurs.

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