Gender Differences in Competitiveness: Experimental Evidence from China

Fredrik Carlsson, Elina Lampi, Peter Martinsson and Xiaojun Yang
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Xiaojun Yang: School of Public Policy and Administration, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China

No 766, Working Papers in Economics from University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics

Abstract: Experimental evidence from both the lab and the field shows that women on average have a lower propensity to enter a competitive environment. In this paper, we investigate gender differences in competitiveness using a lab-in-the-field experiment and a subject pool consisting of Chinese adults. China provides an interesting environment to study in this regard since the country has promoted gender equality for a long time and the gender gap in earnings is small in a cross-country comparison. However, in many respects, China is still a patriarchal society. Our experimental results show that women perform equally well as men in a piece-rate task and significantly better in a competitive payment environment. Despite this, men are more than twice as likely to voluntarily choose a competitive environment. This gender difference cannot be explained by differences in risk preferences or overconfidence.

Keywords: Competition; Gender Difference; Experiments; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D03 D10 I31 P30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2019-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna, nep-exp, nep-gen and nep-hrm
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