Competing for the benefit of offspring eliminates the gender gap in competitiveness

Abstract

Recent advances have highlighted the evolutionary significance of female competition, with the sexes pursuing different competitive strategies and women reserving their most intense competitive behaviors for the benefit of offspring. Influential economic experiments using cash incentives, however, have found evidence suggesting that women have a lower desire to compete than men. We hypothesize that the estimated gender differences critically depend on how we elicit them, especially on the incentives used. We test this hypothesis through an experiment with adults in China (n = 358). Data show that, once the incentives are switched from monetary to child-benefitting, gender differences disappear. This result suggests that female competition can be just as intense as male competition given the right goals, indicating important implications for policies designed to promote gender equality.ollowing pioneering works by Hrdy and Clutton-Brock, significant advances in evolutionary biology, psychology, and anthropology have produced an important body of knowledge on the occurrence and evolutionary significance of female competition (1-5). Despite Darwin's recognition of the importance of intrasexual competition, male-male and female-female competition for resources and sexual reproduction (6), most subsequent work has focused on the mechanisms and consequences of male competition. From an evolutionary perspective, variance in female reproductive outcomes [especially given the successful spread of monogamous marriage norms which reduces sex differences in the opportunity for sexual selection (4, 5, 7)] implies that men and women have been subject to similarly intense selection pressures (1,8). If competitive traits derive from selection pressures, then men and women should each have evolved competitive traits. Recently, important studies have laid the foundation for understanding the difference in competitive strategies pursued by the sexes and, in particular, found that females reserve their most intense competitive behaviors for the benefit of offspring (3,5,8). The goal of this paper is to contribute new behavioral evidence to the study of the different modalities of women's competition.Economists have long observed that sex differences in behavior exist and have consistently documented a gender gap in the desire to compete (9-13). In the standard experimental design on selection into competitive environments, men and women are given a series of computational tasks under different payment conditions and then asked to choose the preferred payment method for a subsequent task (9). Despite the lack of a gender difference in performance, when offered the choice to be paid on a tournament payment scheme or a noncompetitive piece-rate payment scheme, men usually choose tournament significantly more often than women. Controlling for confidence and risk aversion does not explain away the gender gap in choosing tournament. Numerous subsequent studies have replicated this finding, in the laboratory and in the field, and have exp...

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