Can Personality Explain what is Underlying Women's Unwillingness to Compete?

Julia Müller () and Christiane Schwieren

No 511, Working Papers from University of Heidelberg, Department of Economics

Abstract: There is ample evidence that women do not react to competition as men do and are less willing to enter a competition than men (e.g., Gneezy et al.(2003), Niederle and Vesterlund (2007)). In this paper, we use personality variables to understand the underlying motives of women (and men) to enter a competition or avoid it. We use the Big Five personality factors (Goldberg (1981), McCrae and Costa JR (2003)), where especially neuroticism has been related to performance in achievement settings. We first test whether scores on the Big Five are related to performance in our experiment, and second how this is related to incentives. We can show that the sex di fference in the willingness to enter a competition is mediated by neuroticism and further that neuroticism is negatively related to performance in competiton. This raises the possibility that those women who do not choose competitive incentives "know" that they should not.

Keywords: Gender; Personality; Big Five; Five-factor Model; Competition; Experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D03 J16 L00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-04-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-lab
Note: This paper is part of http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/view/schriftenreihen/sr-3.html
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

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Journal Article: Can personality explain what is underlying women’s unwillingness to compete? (2012)
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