Abstract
A recent literature emphasizes the importance of the gender gap in willingness to compete as a partial explanation for gender differences in labor market outcomes. However, whereas experiments investigating willingness to compete typically do so in anonymous environments, real world competitions often have a more public nature, which introduces potential social image concerns. If such image concerns are important, we should expect public observability to further exacerbate the gender gap. We test this prediction using a laboratory experiment that varies whether the decision to compete, and its outcome, is publicly observable. Across four different treatments, however, all treatment effects are close to zero. We conclude that the public observability of decisions and outcomes does not exert a significant impact on male or female willingness to compete, indicating that the role of social image concerns related to competitive decisions may be limited.
Highlights
Gender differences in labor market outcomes remain a primary policy concern
For social image concerns to lead to a larger gender gap in the Public Choice condition, it needs to be true that men get positive and women get negative image utility from selecting into a tournament, as would be the case if there is a gender-specific norm regarding the appropriateness of competitive behavior
Our experiment examines whether the well-documented gender gap in willingness to compete increases when competitive de cisions are observable to others, as compared to when they are private
Summary
Gender differences in labor market outcomes remain a primary policy concern. Women have lower labor market participation, are underrepresented in positions of power, and earn lower wages even when occupying similar positions as men. In the Public Outcome condition, those participants who opted for competition had to publicly announce their choice but, at the end of the third round, the outcome of the competition This allows us to test whether making the outcome of a competition observable to others attenuates the gender gap in willingness to compete. At the same time a large share of existing studies on the gender gap in competitiveness explore this gap in a specific setting, similar to the one introduced by Niederle and Vesterlund (2007) It is important for researchers, organizations, and policy makers to understand how different aspects of the decision-making context may reinforce, or mitigate, the gender gap in willingness to compete.
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