Gender and competition in adolescence: task matters

Abstract

We look at gender differences among adolescents in Sweden in preferences for competition, altruism and risk. For competitiveness, we explore two different tasks that differ in associated stereotypes. We find no gender difference in competitiveness when comparing performance under competition to that without competition. We further find that boys and girls are equally likely to self-select into competition in a verbal task, but that boys are significantly more likely to choose to compete in a mathematical task. This gender gap diminishes and becomes non-significant when we control for actual performance, beliefs about relative performance, and risk preferences, or for beliefs only. Girls are also more altruistic and less risk taking than boys.

Affirmative action or just discrimination? A study on the endogenous emergence of quotas

“…Furthermore, some of the relevant literature to which we relate our findings has also used adding tasks in which there is no gender difference in baseline performance (Balafoutas and Sutter, 2012;Niederle et al, 2013). In any case, future work could examine the task-sensitivity of our findings, given that the nature of the task has been shown to affect the competitive behavior of men and women (Cardenas et al, 2012;Dreber et al, 2014). A further limitation is that our findings may be sensitive to the particular majority rule at the voting stage,…”

Who Lies? A Meta-Analysis of the Effect of Sex, Age, and Education on Honesty

“…Since the dice is rolled privately, researchers cannot detect whether a given participant has lied or not. The only thing the researcher can do is to compare the distribution of reported outcomes with the random distribution, in order to deduce whether a significant 2 Previous research has mainly focus on the effect of demographic characteristics on social preferences (Bolton & Katok, 1995;Eckel & Grossman, 1998;Andreoni & Vesterlund, 2001;Fong, 2001;List, 2004;Dufwenberg & Muren, 2006;Houser and Schunk, 2006;Niederle and Vesterlund, 2007;Croson and Gneezy, 2009;Capraro, Jordan & Rand, 2014;Capraro & Marcelletti, 2014;Carlsson, Johansson-Stenman & Nam, 2014;Dreber et al, 2014;Capraro, 2015;Lin & Yu, 2015;Rieger & Mata, 2015;Brañas-Garza, Capraro & Rascón-Ramírez, 2016;Kettner & Waichman, 2016;Rand et al, 2016).…”

Sex Differences in Competitiveness: Hunter-Gatherer Women and Girls Compete Less in Gender-Neutral and Male-Centric Tasks

“…While no study has examined sex differences in willingness to compete in either an isolated or evolutionarily relevant population, researchers have examined it in for example the United States (e.g., Niederle and Vesterlund 2007), Sweden (e.g., Dreber et al 2014), Colombia (Cárdenas et al 2012), Armenia (Khachatryan et al 2014), India Andersen et al 2013) and China (e.g., Zhang 2013).…”

“…3 That is, men and women's competitive inclinations can vary across different domains. For instance, while most studies find that men are more competitive than women if the task is math-related (e.g., Niederle and Vesterlund 2007;Dreber et al 2014), many studies find that for verbal tasks which are stereotyped to be more female-centric, the sex difference disappears (e.g., Günther et al 2010;Boschini et al 2014;Dreber et al 2014). On the other hand, some studies find no influence of the task on the existence of sex differences in competitiveness (e.g., Dreber et al 2011;Cárdenas et al 2012;Wozniak et al 2014).…”