Gender Gap In Competitiveness Research Articles

The Determinants of Countercyclical Job Satisfaction in the Public Sector

Job satisfaction is sensitive to economic fluctuations; it rises during economic growth and falls in recessions. Job satisfaction also depends on relative comparisons. For workers less affected by business cycles-as is typical in the public sector-job satisfaction may thus be countercyclical due to comparisons with other sectors. Previous laboratory results confirm this countercyclical trend. This study reports new results from the German Socio-Economic Panel confirming the overall countercyclical job satisfaction trend but also revealing this trend is present only among men, not women. We consider three possible drivers of this gender gap. Competitiveness and pro-sociality differ between men and women both in the laboratory and in the field and plausibly interact with job satisfaction countercyclicality. Another potential explanation of countercyclicality is that men are more commonly the primary household providers. We conducted an experiment to explore these three channels. The experiment replicated the countercyclical job satisfaction trend. While identifying a significant gender gap in competitiveness, pro-sociality, and job satisfaction, we found no difference in job satisfaction cyclicality between men and women, nor a correlation with these traits. Our findings suggest that the fundamental gender differences we identified in the laboratory do not drive the gender differences observed in the survey data.

Competition, confidence and gender: Shifting the focus from the overconfident to the realistic

The gender gap in competitiveness is argued to explain gender differences in later life outcomes, including career choices and the gender wage gap. In experimental settings, a prevalent explanation attributes this gap to males being more (over)confident than females (we call this the compositional channel). While our lab-in-the-field study using data from students in 53 classrooms (N> 1000) reproduces this finding, it also uncovers a second, potentially more impactful channel of confidence contributing to the gender gap in competitiveness (the preference channel). To disentangle the two channels, we propose a more precise measure of confidence based on whether the subjects’ believed performance rank exceeds, coincides with or falls short of their actual performance in a real-effort task. We label categories of this Guessed - Actual Performance (GAP) difference as overconfident, realistic or underconfident, respectively. Surprisingly, there is no gender difference in competitiveness within the over- and underconfident subgroups, while a significant gender gap exists among the realistic. So, even if both genders had the same level of confidence, a persistent gender gap in preference (or taste) for competition would remain in the realistic group. This finding is robust across all specifications, challenging previous theories about the overconfidence of men being the main driver of the relationship between confidence and the gender gap in competition.

How social structure shapes female competition throughout her lifetime

Many studies find a consistent gender gap in competitiveness where men are more likely to compete than women given the same level of ability. Using data from experiments with women ages 12 through 90 in matrilocal and patrilocal communities in rural Malawi, we show that this gender gap does not exist uniformly for all women nor across their whole lifetime. We first replicate three main findings from the gender and competition literature: (i) women are less likely to compete on average; and the gender gap differs by (ii) culture and by (iii) age. In a new finding, we show that the gender gap changes in a theoretically-predicted manner with motherhood status. We argue that these results, when combined, point to an overarching theory of gender and competition–one that is driven by environmental constraints that vary with age, fertility, and social structure.

Does Decision Making for Others Close the Gender Gap in Competition?

We examine whether the gender gap in competitiveness in stereotypically male tasks persists when the decision to compete is made by someone else. In a within-subject laboratory experiment, decision makers make competition entry decisions for both themselves and a randomly selected other. Although we replicate the standard gender gap in decisions for oneself, we do not find a gender gap when the decision to compete is made by someone else. This is driven by men being significantly more willing to enter themselves than others into competitions. Men’s and women’s willingness to enter others into competitions is statistically indistinguishable from women’s willingness to enter themselves into competitions. Subgroup analyses reveal that competitive preferences are significantly greater for Asian than non-Asian subjects. Our results have implications for the effectiveness of nominations and mentorship to close gender gaps in labor market outcomes that are affected by competitive preferences. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Funding: This work was supported by the Russell Sage Foundation [Grant G-5602]. Supplemental Material: The data files and online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4861 .

Competing now and then: The effects of delay on competitiveness across gender

Using an online real-effort experiment, we investigate whether and how delaying competition affects the individuals’ willingness to compete. Unlike our prior, we find that men and women are equally likely to compete in our baseline no-delay condition, with a task considered to be gender-neutral. We discuss how the gender gap in entry rates does not appear to be omnipresent, but instead depends on circumstances and beliefs. Men are significantly more likely than women to provisionally sign up for a delayed tournament when a future opportunity to study for the task is available; however, this difference in rates is evanescent, disappearing when the actual choice is made later. Women who have access to studying see an increase in performance, while men do not. Delaying competition by itself does not generate a gender gap in competitiveness. We explore a variety of potential reasons for why knowing one has access to studying produces the gender gap in tournament entry. We rule out differences in risk aversion, confidence, and task stereotypes. Control treatments where the delay itself is a choice rule out the possibility that the forced nature of delay may be at the root of the overly competitive initial decisions by the men. We conjecture that these patterns may arise due to men being more confident than women and making choices based on an overly ambitious view about future selves’ ability to study.

The competitive woman: Evolutionary insights and cross-cultural evidence into finding the Femina Economica

We propose to explain the gender gap in competitiveness often found in economic experiments with a theoretical framework rooted in evolutionary psychology: Women evolved adaptations to trade off the motivation to acquire resources in competitive environments for effort dedicated to investing directly into offspring, to attract and retain mates, and to not alienate potential allomaternal allies. Such a tradeoff does not appear similarly binding for men. To begin to test this idea, we conducted a series of experiments using cash and prizes (in-kind payments dedicated to either children's needs, gender-specific interests, or gender-neutral interests for placebo tests) to reward subjects at different life stages (parents and non-parents) from countries differing in economic development and culture (novel data from Togo, Sierra Leone, Bosnia, Colombia plus China data from Cassar et al. (2016)). Our hypothesis is that different incentive types (cash or prize) may induce specific frames which activate the motivation to compete in different domains of interest, with behavioral predictions that depend on an individual's gender and life stage. Consistent with the predictions, our results on parents from China, Togo, and Sierra Leone and from non-parents from Bosnia show that, once the incentives are switched from cash to child-benefitting or gender-stereotypical goods, the gender gap in competitiveness was largely eliminated, shrinking by more than 10 percentage points, whereas placebo prizes had no impact. Importantly, economic and cultural elements matter, as not all societies exhibit a gender gap to start with (Colombia and Nana Benz of Togo). These findings indicate that competitiveness in women can be much more intense than has been observed, once we include incentives that matter to women, with implications for policies designed to promote gender equality based on labor market incentives aligned with women’ goals and respectful of the differential constraints that nature and societies put on the individual.

Gender, age, and attitude toward competition

A large body of literature has shown the existence of a gender gap in competitiveness and a handful of experimental works investigating the impact of age on this gap lead to inconclusive results. We propose an empirical investigation on that, which is based on survey data and complementary to experimentation. Using individual data from a very large survey (European Value Study on 48 countries from 1990 to 2008), we examine how age influences the gender gap in attitude toward competition. After confirming the existence of a strongly significant gender gap, we find evidence of a gendered effect of age on attitude toward competition. Attitude toward competition has a U-shaped relation with age for men with a least-negative view around 53 years but becomes more and more positive over age for women. We therefore observe a U-shaped pattern of the gender gap with age with a minimum around 60 years. Finally, we show that the gender gap and its change with age are sensitive to both individual and national gender stereotypes, suggesting influences of cultural factors.

Can Sponsorship Address Women's Underrepresentation in Senior Management?

Research suggests that women are underrepresented in senior management because they are less likely than men to compete for promotions and high-promotability assignments. Ascending the corporate ladder, however, also involves sponsors – managers that compete on behalf of protégés for promotions and assignments. Can sponsorship reduce women’s underrepresentation in senior management? To address this question, we use a controlled experiment and investigate how gender impacts managers’ willingness to sponsor their protégés. We find that when earnings accrue to protégés, the gender gap in competitiveness is eliminated, suggesting that female managers are effective sponsors. However, male managers compete significantly more for male, rather than female, protégés. This gap disappears when male managers receive information about protégés’ risk preferences, suggesting an important managerial intervention to increase sponsorship effectiveness.

Competitiveness, gender and handedness

We conduct an intercultural experiment in three locations on three different continents to elicit competitiveness and study whether individual differences in competitiveness are related to handedness. Being a “lefty” (i.e., having either a dominant left hand or a dominant left foot) is associated with neurological differences which are determined prenatally, and can therefore be seen as a proxy for innate differences. In large-scale data with incentivized choices from 3664 participants from India, Norway and Tanzania, we find a significant gender gap in competitiveness in all cultures. However, we find inconsistent results when comparing the competitiveness of lefties and righties. In north-east India we find that lefties of both genders are significantly more competitive than righties. In Norway we find that lefty men are more competitive than any other group, but women’s competitiveness is not related to handedness. In Tanzania, we find no relationship between handedness and the competitiveness of either gender. The merged data show weak evidence of a positive correlation between being a lefty and competitiveness for men, but no such evidence for women. Thus, our data provide suggestive but not robust evidence that individual and gender differences in competitiveness are partially determined by innate factors, where innate factors are proxied by the complex, prenatally shaped trait of handedness.

Focal random selection closes the gender gap in competitiveness.

Gender differences in choosing to enter competitions are an important cause of the leaky pipeline for women in leadership roles and represent a considerable waste of human resources. We used an incentivized laboratory experiment to evaluate whether the introduction of random elements alters the gender gap in competitiveness. We found that focal random selection from a preselected pool removes the difference in competitiveness between men and women and does not dilute the qualifications of the entrants. The percentage of women who took part in competitions was nearly triple, and that of high-ability women double, with focal random selection compared to selection in pure performance competitions. In contrast, the behavior of men remained largely unchanged. Focal random selection closes the gender gap in competitiveness and can substantially enlarge the pool of high-performing women who apply for top jobs.

Him or Her? Choosing Competition on Behalf of Someone Else

We extend the literature on competitive behaviour by investigating environments in which the choice to compete is not made by an individual themselves, but by someone else. Choosing on behalf of others is an integral part of life and gender may be an important factor in shaping the perceived suitability of individuals for career promotions in competitive environments. We assign subjects either the role of an agent or a principal in an experiment. Agents perform a real effort task and a randomly assigned principal chooses whether the agent performs under a piece rate or tournament incentive scheme. Before making a decision for the agent, we vary whether the principal is informed about the agent's gender or not. Regardless of whether gender is revealed, we find no gender gap in competitiveness when principals are choosing for agents. In terms of determinants of the principals' choices, we observe that expectations about their agent's performance, as well as the principal's own preferences for risk and competitiveness matter for the decision to make others compete. In addition, we replicate existing results reporting that women are less willing to enter the tournament than men when choosing themselves. We compare both decision environments and show that efficiency (defined as average performance and earnings) does not suffer, whereas the winners' performance is lower when principals decide for agents. Taken together, our results suggest that allowing others to decide has the potential to increase the representation of women in competitive situations, many of which resemble the labour market.

Gender, competitiveness, and task difficulty: Evidence from the field

This study examines the gender gap in competitiveness in an educational setting and tests whether this gap depends on the difficulty of the task at hand. For this purpose, we administered a series of experiments during the final exam of a university course. We confronted three cohorts of undergraduate students with a set of bonus questions and the choice between an absolute and a tournament grading scheme for these questions. To test the moderating impact of task difficulty, we (randomly) varied the difficulty of the questions between treatment groups. We find that, on average, women are significantly less likely to select the tournament scheme. However, the results show that the gender gap in tournament entry is sizable when the questions are relatively easy, but much smaller and statistically insignificant when the questions are difficult.

Competitiveness, Gender and Handedness: A Large-Sample Intercultural Study

We conduct a large-scale intercultural experiment to elicit competitiveness and ask whether individual and gender differences in competitiveness are partially determined by nature. We use being a “lefty” (i.e., having either a dominant left hand or a dominant left foot) as a proxy for nature, as it is associated with neurological differences which are determined prenatally and reflects a masculinized neurology. That way we use handedness and footedness as a proxy for innate differences. In large-scale data with incentivized choices from 3683 participants from India, Norway and Tanzania, we find a significant gender gap in competitiveness in all cultures. However, we find inconsistent results when comparing the competitiveness of lefties and righties. In northeast India we find that lefties of both genders are significantly more competitive than righties. In Norway we find that lefty men are more competitive than any other group, but women’s competitiveness is not related to handedness or footedness. In Tanzania, we find no effect of handedness or footedness on the competitiveness of either gender. The merged data show weak evidence of a positive correlation between being a lefty and competitiveness for men, but no such evidence for women. Thus, our data do not provide robust evidence that gender differences in competitiveness are partially determined by nature, where nature is represented by the complex, physiologically-rooted phenomenon of handedness.

Closing the gender gap in competitiveness through priming

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.

On the Size of the Gender Difference in Competitiveness

We design a new procedure for measuring competitiveness and use it to estimate the magnitude of the gender gap in competitiveness. Before working on a task, participants choose what percentage of their payoffs will be based on a piece-rate compensation scheme; the rest of their payoff is allocated to a competitive compensation scheme. This novel procedure allows us to distinguish between 101 levels of competitiveness, as opposed to the binary measure used in the literature. Whereas the binary measure allows researchers to conclude that about twice as many men as women choose to compete (typically two-thirds versus one-third), the new procedure sheds light on the intensive margin. We find that the intensity of the preference is more extreme than the binary measure could detect. For example, we find that only one-fifth of the most competitive 25% of our participants are women, and the most competitive 10% of our participants are all men. The new procedure also allows us to study the correlation between competitiveness and parameters such as overconfidence, attitudes toward risk, and ambiguity. Data and the online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2016.2673 . This paper was accepted by Gérard Cachon, behavioral economics.

Laboratory Evidence on the Effects of Sponsorship on the Competitive Preferences of Men and Women

Sponsorship programs have been proposed as one way to promote female advancement in competitive career fields. A sponsor is someone who advocates for a protégé, and in doing so, takes a stake in her success. We use a laboratory experiment to explore two channels through which sponsorship has been posited to increase advancement in a competitive workplace. In our setting, being sponsored provides a vote of confidence and/or creates a link between the protégé’s and sponsor’s payoffs. We find that both features of sponsorship significantly increase willingness to compete among men on average, while neither of these channels significantly increases willingness to compete among women on average. As a result, sponsorship does not close the gender gap in competitiveness or earnings. We discuss how these insights from the laboratory could help to inform the design of sponsorship programs in the field. Data, as supplemental material, are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2016.2606 . This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.

Competing for the benefit of offspring eliminates the gender gap in competitiveness

Recent advances have highlighted the evolutionary significance of female competition, with the sexes pursuing different competitive strategies and women reserving their most intense competitive behaviors for the benefit of offspring. Influential economic experiments using cash incentives, however, have found evidence suggesting that women have a lower desire to compete than men. We hypothesize that the estimated gender differences critically depend on how we elicit them, especially on the incentives used. We test this hypothesis through an experiment with adults in China (n = 358). Data show that, once the incentives are switched from monetary to child-benefitting, gender differences disappear. This result suggests that female competition can be just as intense as male competition given the right goals, indicating important implications for policies designed to promote gender equality.

How Does the Gender Difference in Willingness to Compete Evolve with Experience?

I study how gender differences in willingness to compete evolve over time in response to experience. Participants in a lab experiment perform the same real-effort task over several rounds. In each round, they have to choose between piece-rate remuneration and a winner-takes-all competition. At the end of each round, those who compete get feedback on the competition outcome. The main result is that women are much more likely than men to stop competing after a loss, which leads to the appearance of a significant gender gap in competitiveness even among those who are initially willing to compete. This gender effect is also present for high performers. In an additional experiment, I show that giving feedback to non-competers might further increase the gender gap in willingness to compete as men who initially choose not to compete react more strongly to positive feedback compared to women.

Stress Reactions Cannot Explain the Gender Gap in Willingness to Compete

Women are often less willing than men to compete, even in tasks where there is no gender gap in performance. Also, many people experience competitive contexts as stressful and previous research has documented that men and women sometimes react differently to acute stressors. We use two laboratory experiments to investigate whether factors related to stress can help explain the gender gap in competitiveness. Experiment 1 studies whether stress responses (measured with salivary cortisol and through self-assessment) to taking part in a mandatory competition predict individual willingness to participate in a voluntary competition. We find that while the mandatory competition does increase stress levels, there is no gender difference in this reaction. Cortisol response does not predict willingness to compete for men but is positively and significantly correlated with choosing to enter the voluntary competition for women. In Experiment 2 we exogenously induce stress using the cold-pressor task. We find no causal effect of stress on competitiveness for the sample as a whole and only tentative evidence of a positive effect for women. In summary, even though there are some gender differences in the relation between stress responses and the decision to enter a competition or not, these cannot explain the general gender gap in willingness to compete that is generally found in the literature and which we replicate.

Honesty in managerial reporting: How competition affects the benefits and costs of lying

Although research on honesty in managerial reporting has provided important evidence for the idea that competition can restrict the relevance of honesty preferences, why exactly competition has this effect remains largely unexplored. This paper suggests that different aspects of competition independently affect honesty in managerial reporting: economic competition affects the economic benefits of lying, while rivalry diminishes the moral costs of lying. Based on recent findings from social psychology and experimental economics on a gender gap in competitiveness, the study further hypothesizes that the effects of competition on honesty differ across gender. A laboratory experiment was conducted, in which participants had to report cost information in a participative budgeting context under different competitive and non-competitive conditions. Results indicate that an individual's willingness to report honestly decreases significantly when rivalry is introduced, even if the economic benefits of lying remain constant. In contrast, economic competition only diminished the salience of honesty preferences of male participants in the experiment. In conclusion, corporate managers who wish to take advantage of the positive effects of competition, such as increased motivation and efficiency in capital allocation processes, should not only focus on its economic effects but also be aware of its potential negative impact.