Gender differences in competitiveness are often discussed as a potential explanation for gender differences in education and labor market outcomes. We correlate an incentivized measure of competitiveness with an important career choice of secondary school students in the Netherlands. At the age of 15, these students have to pick one out of four study profiles, which vary in how prestigious they are. While boys and girls have very similar levels of academic ability, boys are substantially more likely than girls to choose more prestigious profiles. We find that competitiveness is as important a predictor of profile choice as gender. More importantly, up to 23 percent of the gender difference in profile choice can be attributed to gender differences in competitiveness. This lends support to the extrapolation of laboratory findings on competitiveness to labor market settings. JEL-codes: C9, I20, J24, J16

Gender differences in competitiveness are often discussed as a potential explanation for gender differences in education and labor market outcomes. We correlate an incentivized measure of competitiveness with an important career choice of secondary school students in the Netherlands. At the age of 15, these students have to pick one out of four study profiles, which vary in how prestigious they are. While boys and girls have very similar levels of academic ability, boys are substantially more likely than girls to choose more prestigious profiles. We find that competitiveness is as important a predictor of profile choice as gender. More importantly, up to 23 percent of the gender difference in profile choice can be attributed to gender differences in competitiveness. This lends support to the extrapolation of laboratory findings on competitiveness to labor market settings. JEL-codes: C9, I20, J24, J16

a b s t r a c tWe examine whether competitiveness in women is influenced by biological factors. Female participants in a laboratory experiment solve a simple arithmetics task first under a piece rate and then under a competitive tournament scheme. Participants can then choose which compensation scheme to apply in a third round. We find that the likelihood of selecting into the competitive environment varies strongly and significantly over the menstrual cycle and with the intake of hormonal contraceptives. The observed patterns are consistent with a negative impact of the sex hormone progesterone on competitiveness. We show that the effect of the menstrual cycle and hormonal contraceptives on competitiveness is due neither to an impact on performance, nor to an impact on risk aversion or overconfidence.

While women outnumber men on university campuses in most developed countries, strong gender differences in field of study persist. Science, technology, mathematics, and engineering (STEM) related subjects attract relatively few women while the humanities are predominately female.1 In many European countries, specialization into different academic fields begins in high school, and studies show that girls shy away from math-intensive specializations already at that stage.2 The choice of a more math-intensive high school specialization has been shown to causally affect labor market earnings (Joensen and Nielsen 2009) and the reluctance of women to pick such specializations is therefore a partial explanation for the gender gap in earnings.Recent evidence suggests that gender differences in study choices are partially determined by the well-documented gender gap in willingness to compete.3 We contribute to this 1 See, e.g.,

Comparative payment schemes and tournament-style promotion mechanisms are pervasive in the workplace. We test experimentally whether they have a negative impact on people’s willingness to cooperate. Participants first perform in a simple task and then participate in a public goods game. The payment scheme for the task varies across treatment groups. Compared with a piece-rate scheme, individuals in a winner-takes-all competition are significantly less cooperative in the public goods game. A lottery treatment, where the winner is decided by luck, has the same effect. In a competition treatment with feedback, winners cooperate as little as participants in the other treatments, whereas losers cooperate even less. All three treatments lead to substantial losses in the realised social surplus from the public good while having no significant impact on performance. In a complementary experiment, we aim to shed light on the psychological mechanisms behind our results. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2015.2257 . This paper was accepted by Teck-Hua Ho, behavioral economics.