Emirati women do not shy away from competition: evidence from a patriarchal society in transition

Abstract

We explore gender attitudes towards competition in the United Arab Emirates -a traditionally patriarchal society which in recent times has adopted numerous policies to empower women and promote their role in the labor force. The experimental treatments vary whether individuals compete in single-sex or mixed-sex groups. In contrast to previous studies, women in our sample are not less willing to compete than men. In fact, once we control for individual performance, Emirati women are more likely to select into competition. Our analysis shows that neither women nor men shy away from competition, and both compete more than what would be optimal in monetary terms as the fraction of men in their group increases. We offer a detailed survey of the literature and discuss possible reasons for the lack of gender differences in our experiment.

Measuring preferences for competition with experimentally-validated survey questions

“…As a robustness check, we did the comparison between athletes and non-athletes separately by gender. Since men have been found to be more competitive than women in many student populations (for a review, see Dariel et al, 2017), the difference in preferences for competition reported above could be driven by differences in the fraction of men and women in the two populations (32% of the athletes are women while 54% of the non-athletes are women). In the lower part of Table 3, we show the summary statistics of the answer to Q4 for men and women.…”

Empowerment, Knowledge Sharing and Innovative Behaviours: Exploring Gender Differences

“…This is considered an important part of the country's strategy to become among the countries at the forefront of women's empowerment (Al Serkal, 2015). As a testimony to this commitment, the government established a UAE "Gender Balance Council" charged with promoting equality and opportunities for women in the labour market (Al Serkal, 2015;Dariel et al, 2017;UAE government, 2017). Resulting from this, major improvements on women's involvement in administration have followed.…”

“…Resulting from this, major improvements on women's involvement in administration have followed. For instance, currently nine of the 28 ministers in the UAE government are females (Dariel et al, 2017).…”

Willingness to compete: Between‐ and within‐gender comparisons

“…Although Maasai men choose to compete twice as often as women, the opposite result was observed in the Khasi population. Dariel, Kephart, Nikiforakis, and Zenker () revealed that Emirati women are more likely to select into competition than men. Jung and Vranceanu () reveal that the well‐being of Korean women improves after being exposed to competitive compensation in the lab, while the reverse is observed for French women.…”