Gender, competition, and performance: Evidence from chess players

Abstract

This paper studies gender differences in performance in a male‐dominated competitive environment chess tournaments. We find that the gender composition of chess games affects the behaviors of both men and women in ways that worsen the outcomes for women. Using a unique measure of within‐game quality of play, we show that women make more mistakes when playing against men. Men, however, play equally well against male and female opponents. We also find that men persist longer before losing to women. Our results shed some light on the behavioral changes that lead to differential outcomes when the gender composition of competitions varies.

Gender differences in equilibrium play and strategic sophistication variability

“…Participants played anonymously against a randomly chosen person in the session. 3 They took their decision and recorded it in their reporting sheet. When they all …nished and reporting sheets were collected, participants were asked to …ll up a brief non-incentivized questionnaire designed to measure beliefs, explicit gender stereotypes and types of failures in game form recognition (see Appendix A).…”

“…Evidence from experiments and observational data suggests that women perform worse than men in tournaments (e.g. Gneezy, Niederle and Rustichini, 2003; Gneezy and Rustichini, 2004;Backus et al 2016). However, this e¤ect seems to be mediated by the perceived gender-bias of the task at hand, that is, whether males or females are expected to perform better.…”

“…For a similar approach, see the one-player beauty contest studied by Bosch-Rosa and Meissner (2020) 3. During the session, one of the experimenters generated a random matching of participants into pairs using https://www.randomlists.com/team-generator.…”

Checking gender bias: Parents and mentors perceive less chess potential in girls.

“…Much less work has examined how structural factors (e.g., bias, discrimination) contribute to the underrepresentation of women in chess. One line of research on this topic used data from chess tournaments to argue that stereotype threat (Schmader et al, 2008;Spencer et al, 2016) contributes to girls' and women's underperformance against male players compared to other female players (Backus et al, 2016;Maass et al, 2008;Rothgerber & Wolsiefer, 2014). Other relevant work used semistructured interviews to explore the barriers to playing chess that girls and women often encounter (Baasanjav, 2017;Galitis, 2002).…”