Gender and Competition: Do competitive environments favor men more than women?

尽管女性在职场追赶男性方面取得了长足的进步，但在工资和晋升水平上，性别差距依然存在。对这种差距的常见解释从性别歧视的指控到声称妇女比男子对工作和家庭冲突更敏感，因此不太愿意为自己的事业做出牺牲的说法。我们认为，另一个因素可能在起作用：男性和女性对竞争的反应方式存在根深蒂固的差异，这种差异甚至在很小的时候就表现出来了。先前的一项研究(Gnezy，Niederle和Rustichini，QJE，2003)涉及数百名学生。六名学生组成一组，在电脑上解决简单的迷宫问题。在一些小组中，受试者在实验期间解决的每一个问题都会得到50美分的报酬。在另一些实验中，只有解决问题最多的人才会得到奖励--但每解决一个迷宫就会得到3美元的奖励。不管这些学生的性别构成如何，当学生根据自己的表现获得报酬时，男性在解决迷宫问题方面的平均表现略好一些。但当只有最优秀的学生拿到工资时，男性的平均表现大幅上升，增幅约为50%，而女性的表现保持不变。对这一结果的一个看似合理的解释是，因为男性在解决迷宫问题上略好一些，他们有更高的动机在竞争中加大努力。现在，我们希望通过调查其他可能有利于女性的任务来检验这一解释，比如解决字谜问题。这些新任务将在与迷宫研究非常相似的环境中进行。主要的研究问题是，执行新任务是否会改变(缩小)性别差距？到目前为止，研究结果得出的主要结论是，女性比男性对竞争的反应要小得多--这一趋势具有重要的意义。如果差距受到任务性质和刻板印象的影响，那么调查结果的政策含义应该得到改善。例如，当考虑单一的性别课程时，应该只针对刻板印象为男孩更好的数学，或者也应该针对刻板印象为女性更好的文学。

Although women have made huge strides in catching up with men in the workplace, a gender gap persists both in wages and levels of advancement. Commonly cited explanations for this gap range from charges of sex discrimination to claims that women are more sensitive than men to work-family conflicts and thus less inclined to make sacrifices for their careers. We suggest that another factor may be at work: a deeply ingrained difference in the way men and women react to competition that manifests itself even at an early age. A previous study (Gneezy, Niederle and Rustichini, QJE, 2003) involved several hundred students. Groups of six students were paid to solve simple maze problems on a computer. In some groups, subjects were paid 50 cents for each problem they solved during the experiment. In others, only the person solving the most problems got rewarded--but at the rate of $3 for each maze solved. Regardless of the sexual makeup of the groups, men, on average, performed slightly better at solving mazes when students were paid for their own performance. But when only the top student was paid, average male performance rose sharply--by about 50%--while female performance remained the same. A plausible explanation for this result is that because men are slightly better at solving mazes, they have higher incentives to increase effort in the competition. We now wish to test this explanation by investigating other tasks that may favor women, such as solving anagrams. These new tasks will be performed in a very similar environment to the maze study. The main research question is does moving to the new task change (reduce) the gender gap? The main conclusion from the findings so far is that females tend to be far less responsive to competition than males--a tendency with important implications. If the gap is affected by the nature of the task and the stereotypes, then the policy implications of the findings should be refined. For example, when considering a single sex classes, should it be only for math where the stereotype is that boys are better, or also for literature in which the stereotype is that women are better.