Performance in Competitive Environments: Gender Differences

In spite of the fact that equal opportunities for men and women have been a priority in many countries, enormous gender differences prevail in most competitive high-ranking positions. We conduct a series of controlled experiments to investigate whether women might react differently than men to competitive incentive schemes commonly used in job evaluation and promotion. We observe no significant gender difference in mean performance when participants are paid proportional to their performance. But in the competitive environment with mixed gender groups we observe a significant gender difference: the mean performance of men has a large and significant, that of women is unchanged. This gap is not due to gender differences in risk aversion. We then run the same test with homogeneous groups, to investigate whether women under-perform only when competing against men. Women do indeed increase their performance and gender differences in mean performance are now insignificant. These results may be due to lower skill of women, or more likely to the fact that women dislike competition, or alternatively that they feel less competent than their male competitors, which depresses their performance in mixed tournaments. Our last experiment provides support for this hypothesis.