Gender Differences in the Willingness to Compete Emerge Early in Life and Persist

Abstract

Gender differences in the willingness to compete have been identified as one important factor in explaining gender differences in labor markets and within organizations. We present three experiments with a total of 1,570 subjects, ages three to 18 years, to investigate the origins of this gender gap. In a between-subjects design we find that boys are more likely to compete than girls as early as kindergarten and that this gap prevails throughout adolescence. Re-examining the behavior of 316 subjects in a within-subjects design two years later, we show that these gender differences also largely persist over a longer time period and can thus be considered stable. Controlling for subjects' abilities in the different tasks, their risk attitudes, and expected performance, the gender gap in the willingness to compete is estimated in the range of 10–20 percentage points. We discuss the implications of our findings for policy interventions and organizational management. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.1981 . This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.

How Uncertainty and Ambiguity in Tournaments Affect Gender Differences in Competitive Behavior

“…Many papers have found a ratio in the willingness to compete of men and women close to 2:1 (e.g., Niederle and Vesterlund, 2007;Sutter and Glätzle-Rützler, 2015), and we expected a similar ratio. In many of the experiments that use adding up numbers as experimental tasks, men perform slightly better than women, but frequently the difference is insignificant.…”

“…2009;Gill and Prowse, 2014;Almås et al, 2016) and that women shy away from competition much more often than men (seminal paper by Niederle and Vesterlund, 2007; see also Booth and Nolen, 2012;Datta Gupta et al, 2013;Brandts et al, 2014;Buser et al 2014;Sutter and Glätzle-Rützler, 2015;Flory et al, 2015;Saccardo et al 2017).2 Since firms often use tournament payment and promotion schemes (Eriksson, 1999;Bognanno, 2001), a lower inclination of women towards competition can help explain to some extent why they are less often promoted and end up with lower wages.3 Providing empirical evidence in this vein, McGee et al (2015) show on the basis of US data that women are less likely than men to be remunerated with a competitive compensation package and that this can explain part of the wage gap between the two genders.…”

“…In reality, it is highly un- Recent research shows that affirmative action policies can be successful in increasing women's willingness to compete, with only limited harmful side-effects (Balafoutas and Sutter, 2012;Villeval, 2012;Niederle et al, 2013;Calsamiglia et al, 2013;Banerjee et al, 2016;Sutter et al, 2016;Kölle, 2017;Maggian and Montinari, 2017). Additional recent research on gender and competitiveness studies competitive behavior in adolescence (Dreber et al, 2011;Sutter and Glätzle-Rützler, 2015) or the impact of family background (Almås et al, 2016), advice (Brandts et al, 2014), stress (Buser et al, 2017), and team decision-making on competitive behavior (Healy andPate, 2011, Dargnies, 2012). 3…”

The Impact of Advice on Women's and Men's Selection into Competition

“…Some studies find that the gender gap remains after controlling for some relevant factors. In their study of young children, Sutter and Glätzle-Rützler (2014) find that the gender gap between boys and girls in entering a competition is robust to controlling for gender differences in risk attitudes, overconfidence, and past performance. In their study with students around 15 years old, Booth and Nolen (2012) also observe a gender gap after controlling for risk attitudes and past performance, but other studies do not find significant gender differences in the willingness to compete when controlling for other factors such as distributional preferences, risk attitudes, and past performance , or for confidence levels (Charness et al 2011).…”

“…These studies started with the discussion of how incentive schemes affect women's and men's performance differently (Gneezy et al 2003). The gender gap in entry into competition found by Niederle and Vesterlund (2007) seems to be quite robust, as the results in a number of papers with similar designs show (see, e.g., , Booth and Nolen 2012, Cason et al 2010, Dargnies 2012, Sutter and Glätzle-Rützler 2014, Wozniak et al 2014. In addition, similar gender gaps were found under a variety of different designs (see, e.g., Gupta et al 2013, Dohmen and Falk 2011 and in the field (Flory et al 2010).…”