SBP: Gender Differences in Willingness to Compete - Incentive Mechanism Effects

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Economics has advanced the idea that women are less competitive, less risk tolerant, and less ambitious than men. This conclusion is based on experiments in which men have been shown to increase their performance when placed in competitive environments and, when given a choice, to choose competitive environments at higher rates than women. However, with few notable exceptions, the reward medium in these experiments is cash exclusively benefiting the subject making the decisions. Recent experimental results show that women close the competitiveness gap with men when exogenously placed in competitive yet prosocial environments in which individuals can share their competitively earned gains with others. This finding suggests that female competitiveness can be just as intense as male competitiveness once the winners of tournaments are allowed to share some of the gains with the losers. The research to be undertaken will further explore this phenomenon and identify the motivations producing the result. The work will provide insights into designing economic institutions that promote gender equality and suggest specific mechanisms for closing the gender-gap.The research will proceed in two stages. The first will examine the competitiveness gap between men and women in an experiment involving competitive yet prosocial incentives where the choice to compete is endogenous. A series of experiments will then be conducted to identify possible mechanisms responsible for the reduction in the competitiveness gap: true pro-sociality, fear of backlash from not conforming to the gender stereotype, and risk aversion.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.