The emergence of male leadership in competitive environments

Abstract

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How stereotypes impair women’s careers in science

“…As a result, men's announcements overestimated their future performance by 2.28 sums, and women's underestimated their future performance by −1.17 sums (significantly different with a Mann-Whitney U test, P = 0.008). This behavior is consistent with existing research reporting that women underestimate their performance and show more modesty than men in self-promotion (15,16). Thus, because men overestimate their future performance, and women underestimate it, optimal updating would require compensating for these biases by giving less weight to the announcements of men than those of women, leading to a significantly lower φ ij for men (by −0.21, P = 0.001).…”

“…Men tend to be more self-promoting than women in these reports, but employers, particularly those demonstrating evidence of stronger implicit sex bias (higher IAT), do not fully appreciate the extent of this difference. Thus, the bias against women measured by the IAT seems to act in two ways: It penalizes women when an unfounded negative stereotype against them exists, and it does not penalize men when there is evidence (15,16) that they overpromote themselves.…”

The Impact of Advice on Women's and Men's Selection into Competition

“…One important reason for the gender gap in entry into competition seems to be that men are relatively more overconfident (for a review, see Croson and Gneezy 2009), in particular in a tournament environment (Charness et al 2011, Reuben et al 2012. Beliefs about one's performance are important not only on the supply side of the labor market.…”

Overconfidence And Preferences For Competition

“…10 For example, a gender difference in the choice of the tournament has been found in Niederle and Vesterlund (2007), Cason, Masters, and Sheremeta (2010), Healy and Pate (2011), Balafoutas and Sutter (2012), Reuben et al (2012), and Niederle, Segal, and Vesterlund (2013), in addition to experiments that vary the design in important ways like Gneezy, Leonard, and List (2009), Dohmen andFalk (2011), Booth andNolen (2012), Andersen et al (2013), and Gupta, Poulsen, and Villeval (2013).…”