Women Dislike Competing Against Men

Abstract

A prominent finding in the literature on gender competition is that women are less inclined to compete in comparison to men. In this paper, we conduct a laboratory experiment to examine the relevance of beliefs about the sex of potential competitors on men’s and women’s decision to enter competition. Specifically, we test whether women have a weaker preference to compete per se, or rather just shy away from competing against men. The results support the latter hypothesis. When given the possibility of choosing a competitor’s sex, or when being in the lab surrounded only by female participants, the percentage of women entering competition is high and similar to the figures commonly reported for men. Moreover, only women are sensitive to the different cues we provide about the sex of potential competitors, and their competitiveness is largely driven by their beliefs about other women’s competitive attitude. These findings have distinctive policy implications for the labor markets in which women are underrepresented. Above all, we argue that on-going interventions that highlight women’s underrepresentation in job advertisements, which are intended to encourage women to apply, could be triggering the opposite effect. Instead, we advocate a nudge in the form of persuasive references to recent female applicants and/or existing female workers.