Gender, Competition and Performance: Evidence from Real Tournaments

Abstract

There is a growing literature looking at how men and women respond differently to competition. We contribute to this literature by studying gender differences in performance in a high-stakes and male dominated competitive environment, expert chess tournaments. Our findings show that women underperform compared to men of the same ability and that the gender composition of games drives this effect. Using within player variation in the conditionally random gender of their opponent, we find that women earn significantly worse outcomes against male opponents. We examine the mechanisms through which this effect operates by using a unique measure of within game quality of play. We find that the gender composition effect is driven by women playing worse against men, rather than by men playing better against women. The gender of the opponent does not affect a male player's quality of play. We also find that men persist longer against women before resigning. These results suggest that the gender composition of competitions affects the behavior of both men and women in ways that are detrimental to the performance of women. Lastly, we study the effect of competitive pressure and find that players' quality of play deteriorates when stakes increase, though we find no differential effect over the gender composition of games.JEL Codes: D03, J16, J24, J70, L83, M50.

Gender and Willingness to Compete for High Stakes

“…Exceptions are Booth and Nolen (2012) and Geraldes (2018), who similarly find that women avoid competing against men. Such a dislike is in line with evidence that women perform worse when they compete against men (Gneezy, Niederle and Rustichini, 2003;Günther et al, 2010;Backus et al, 2016;de Sousa and Hollard, 2016;Booth, Cardona-Sosa and Nolen, 2018;Booth and Yamamura, 2018).…”

“…Strategic interaction is typically ruled out by design in willingness-to-compete experiments, and how gender differences play out when the optimal choice depends on the anticipated behavior of competitors has therefore received even less attention. 2 This neglect is surprising in the light of the evidence that women perform worse when they compete with men (Gneezy, Niederle and Rustichini, 2003;Günther et al, 2010;Backus et al, 2016;de Sousa and Hollard, 2016;Booth, Cardona-Sosa and Nolen, 2018;Booth and Yamamura, 2018). Our study underlines the importance of considering the gender composition of the competitor base when investigating gender differences in willingness to compete.…”

Female Chess Players Show Typical Stereotype-Threat Effects: Commentary on Stafford (2018)

“…Although these findings are inconsistent with Stafford’s, they are conceptually similar to the results of Backus, Cubel, Guid, Sanchez-Pages, and Mañas (2016), who examined computer-rated quality of moves in games by chess experts. After controlling for ranking, Backus et al showed that female players make moves of equal quality to male players when they play other women but make moves of lower quality when they play against men.…”

Mind the Absent Gap: Gender-Specific Competitive Behavior in Nonprofessional Sports

“…Gerdes and Gränsmark (2010) take data from mixed-gender chess games and find that men not only are more risk-loving but also choose more aggressive opening strategies against women even if this reduces their probability to win the game. According to de Sousa and Hollard (2015) and Backus, Cubel, Guid, Sánchez-Pages, and Mañas (2016) women play worse against men in chess competitions.…”