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April 23, 2004

Women less competitive?

From a paper entitled Performance in Competitive Environments: Gender Differences, published in the August 2003 MIT Quarterly Journal of Economics:

...women may be less effective than men in competitive environments, even if they are able to perform similarly in noncompetitive environments. In a laboratory experiment we observe, as we increase the competitiveness of the environment, a significant increase in performance for men, but not for women. This results in a significant gender gap in performance in tournaments, while there is no gap when participants are paid accornding to piece rate. This effect is strong when women have to compete against men than in single-sex competitive environments.

Marginal Revolution posts about the paper, in Politically Incorrect Paper of the Month, v.2:

What do we make of all this? First, we have an additional explanation for wage differences between men and women, especially at the highest levels where competition for promotion is a tournament. Second, we have added support for single-sex education and perhaps even single-sex firms (Astute readers will recall what happened to the women on The Apprentice before and after the groups were mixed).

Posted by Gina at 12:43 PM in Research | Permalink

Comments

Of course I was nodding and agreeing and thinking about that before you even mentioned The Apprentice. It was such a shame to watch them give up their power.

But really, I think it has much more to do with the way girls are raised in their home environment than in gender divided schools? It's all well and good getting a same sex education, but if a parent (mostly the male parent) doesn't promote a sense of confidence at home for a girl to carry into the world with her, they have done their daughter a terrible disservice.

Posted by: Teresa at Apr 23, 2004 1:05:45 PM

I'm really skeptical of this kind of study. It's like the Brainsex stuff, affirming DIFFERENCES and my goodness it's hard to really, truly know what's nature and what's nuture. Baby girls are brought up and treated so entirely differenlty from baby boys, even when the parents try to treat them the same - I know, I've tried. From the moment they hand out the pink or blue baby blankets in the maternity wards everyone around your baby lacy or mini-man clothes, calls her sweet and him tough, encourages her to play with dolls and him to play with balls.

What do we expect?

Studies like this are presumably accurate descriptions of what the situation was in this firm at this time, but they don't say what our REAL potential is, and worse: they're so often used to perpetuate differences and discrimination.

Posted by: Jill at Apr 23, 2004 4:18:21 PM

I do hope that everyone reads this article carefully before making any conclusions. As Jill correctly states this experiment points out an effect but does not venture any guesses as to the ultimate source of the effect. To conclude that women are *inately* less competitive than men is to miss the point.

The study references earlier work by Steele which showed that African-Americans also perform worse in competitive testing versus a test they have been told is for other purposes. The conclusion is not of course that African-Americans are inately less competitive.

The phenomenon is a broad social one and is known as 'stereotype vulnerability' Presumably it also affects, say, short men playing basketball against tall men. That is, there is a stereotype that a certain class is better in this or that particular environment and that pereception affects performance.

So all that these studies show is that women do indeed feel, at a gut level, that they cannot compete with men. In a sense, we have known this all along and presumably is why sites like misbehaving exist - to change that stereotype perception among both men and women.

Posted by: Ricardo at Apr 24, 2004 3:24:40 PM