Gender stereotypes and hiding low performance

Abstract

Do men incur a psychological cost when they are outperformed by a woman competitor? We conduct a laboratory experiment that allows us to measure this cost. The experiment is conducted in both the US and China. In our Chinese sample, men are willing to pay more to hide the fact that they have performed worse than another individual than women are, while there is no gender difference in the US. In China, women are willing to pay more to hide poor performance when losing to another woman than to a man, while in the US, the opposite pattern is observed.