Gender Differences in Willingness to Compete: The Role of Public Observability
Gender Differences in Willingness to Compete: The Role of Public Observability
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DOI：
10.2139/ssrn.2997071
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发表时间：
2017-06
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
T. Buser;Eva Ranehill;R. van Veldhuizen
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
T. Buser;Eva Ranehill;R. van Veldhuizen
最近的文献强调了竞争意愿的性别差距的重要性，作为劳动力市场结果性别差异的部分解释。然而，尽管调查竞争意愿的实验通常是在匿名环境中进行的，但真实的世界竞争往往具有更公开的性质，这引入了潜在的社会形象问题。如果这样的形象问题很重要，我们应该期待公众的可观察性进一步加剧性别差距。我们使用实验室实验来测试这一预测，该实验改变了竞争的决定及其结果是否是公开可观察的。然而，在四种不同的治疗方法中，所有治疗效果都接近于零。我们的结论是，公众的可观察性的决定和结果不施加显着的影响，男性或女性的竞争意愿，这表明社会形象的关注与竞争决策的作用可能是有限的。
A recent literature emphasizes the importance of the gender gap in willingness to compete as a partial explanation for gender differences in labor market outcomes. However, whereas experiments investigating willingness to compete typically do so in anonymous environments, real world competitions often have a more public nature, which introduces potential social image concerns. If such image concerns are important, we should expect public observability to further exacerbate the gender gap. We test this prediction using a laboratory experiment that varies whether the decision to compete, and its outcome, is publicly observable. Across four different treatments, however, all treatment effects are close to zero. We conclude that the public observability of decisions and outcomes does not exert a significant impact on male or female willingness to compete, indicating that the role of social image concerns related to competitive decisions may be limited.