How Does the Gender Difference in Willingness to Compete Evolve with Experience?

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Abstract I study how gender differences in willingness to compete evolve over time in response to experience. Participants in a lab experiment perform the same real-effort task over several rounds. In each round, they have to choose between piece-rate remuneration and a winner-takes-all competition. At the end of each round, those who compete get feedback on the competition outcome. The main result is that women are much more likely than men to stop competing after a loss, which leads to the appearance of a significant gender gap in competitiveness even among those who are initially willing to compete. This gender effect is also present for high performers. In an additional experiment, I show that giving feedback to non-competers might further increase the gender gap in willingness to compete as men who initially choose not to compete react more strongly to positive feedback compared to women. JEL: C91, D03, J01, J16 Terms of use: Documents in

Gender, competitiveness, and task difficulty: Evidence from the field

“…However, men and women may not respond equally to variations in task difficulty. This follows from another group of confidence studies ( Buser, 2016;Mobius et al, 2011;Roberts and Nolen-Hoeksema, 1989 ) suggesting that men and women differ in the extent to which they place weight on different self-assessment criteria. While men place more weight on their self-assessed performance in an ongoing task, women tend to be more conservative in their belief updating and rather rely on (external) assessments of their past performance in similar tasks.…”

Women in a men’s world: Risk taking in an online card game community

“…The smaller initial gap and the increase in knocking rates observed in Panel 4a might be attributable to players requiring some time to understand the features of the platform (see footnote 19). Alternatively, it might signal gender differences in the evolution of risk taking, similar to gender differences in response to wins and losses observed in tournament performance (Gill and Prowse, 2014), challenge seeking (Buser, 2016b) and tournament entry dynamics (Buser, 2016a).…”

Do male and female authors employ different journal choice strategies?

“…Concerning the authors whose papers get rejected (which is to say-almost all of us), gender difference in willingness to compete after a negative feedback (observed, in student samples, by Buser (2016) and Buser and Yuan (2019)) might affect future submission patterns. Specifically, females might be willing to submit to lower-ranked journal than males after a rejection, thus decreasing their chances for a publication in a prestigious outlet.…”