Abstract
Men have been observed to have a greater willingness to compete compared to women, and it is possible that this contributes to gender differences in wages and career advancement. Policy interventions such as quotas are sometimes used to remedy this but these may cause unintended side-effects. Here, we present experimental evidence that a simple and practically costless tool—priming subjects with power—can close the gender gap in competitiveness. While in a neutral as well as in a low-power priming situation men are much more likely than women to choose competition, this gap vanishes when subjects are primed with a high-power situation. We show that priming with high power makes competition entry decisions more realistic and also that it reduces the level of risk tolerance among male participants, which can help explain why it leads to a closing down of the gender gap in competitiveness.
Highlights
Men have been observed to have a greater willingness to compete compared to women, and it is possible that this contributes to gender differences in wages and career advancement
Participants assigned to the highpower priming (HIGH) condition were asked to recall and write about a personal situation in which they had control over another individual or individuals, while those assigned to the low-power priming (LOW) condition were instructed to write about a personal situation in which someone else had control over them
When asked to state on a scale from 1 to 9 how much they felt in power in their described situation, subjects reported significantly higher numbers on average in HIGH (6.22) than in LOW (3.41; Mann–Whitney U, z = −9.39, P < 0.001, n = 256, see Supplementary Table 1 for more details)
Summary
Men have been observed to have a greater willingness to compete compared to women, and it is possible that this contributes to gender differences in wages and career advancement. Various interventions have been found to promote gender-balanced outcomes in labor markets, including quotas[8,9,10], preferential treatment of women[9], prizes benefiting one’s offspring[11], or incentives based on co-operation[12] Such policies typically require (costly) institutional changes, are subject to skepticism and opposition, or hard to implement on practical grounds. We consider it as important to examine complementary, less intrusive and inexpensive, ways to mitigate or even offset the gender differences in competitiveness Companies and their human resource departments may benefit from such alternatives because they have an interest in selecting the best candidates for a job, irrespective of gender, which requires the best candidates to accept the challenges of competition and feel comfortable in such situations. Our findings suggest that a simple and inexpensive intervention based on priming with power can contribute to a gender-balanced pattern in competitive behavior
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