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

尽管女性在职场上已经在追赶男性方面取得了巨大进步，但在工资和晋升水平上，性别差距仍然存在。对这一差距的常见解释有性别歧视的指责，也有女性比男性对工作与家庭的冲突更敏感，因此不太愿意为事业做出牺牲的说法。我们认为另一个因素可能在起作用：男性和女性在应对竞争的方式上根深蒂固的差异，甚至在很小的时候就表现出来了。先前的一项研究（Gneezy， Niederle和Rustichini， QJE, 2003）涉及数百名学生。每组6名学生在电脑上解决简单的迷宫问题。在一些小组中，实验对象在实验中每解决一个问题就能得到50美分。在其他情况下，只有解决最多问题的人才能得到奖励——但每解决一个迷宫，奖励3美元。无论小组的性别构成如何，平均而言，当学生们根据自己的表现获得报酬时，男性在解决迷宫方面的表现略好一些。但是，当只有最优秀的学生获得报酬时，男性的平均表现大幅提高了约50%，而女性的表现则保持不变。对这一结果的一个合理解释是，因为男性在解迷宫方面稍好一些，他们在竞争中有更大的动力去加大努力。我们现在希望通过调查其他可能对女性有利的任务来验证这一解释，比如解字谜。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，转移到新的任务是否会改变（减少）性别差距？到目前为止，从这些发现中得出的主要结论是，女性对竞争的反应往往远不如男性——这一趋势具有重要意义。如果差距受到任务性质和定型观念的影响，则调查结果所涉政策问题应加以改进。例如，在考虑单一性别的课程时，是应该只上男生更优秀的数学课，还是应该只上女生更优秀的文学课？

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.