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She Could Not Agree More: The Role of Failure Attribution in Shaping the Gender Gap in Competition Persistence

Manar Alnamlah and Christina Gravert
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Manar Alnamlah: Department of Strategy and Innovation, Copenhagen Business School

No 20-25, CEBI working paper series from University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics. The Center for Economic Behavior and Inequality (CEBI)

Abstract: In competitive and high-reward domains such as corporate leadership and entrepreneurship, women are not only underrepresented but they are also more likely to drop-out after failure. In this study, we conducted a laboratory experiment to investigate the influence of attributing failure to one of the three causal attributions - luck, effort, and ability - on the gender difference in competition persistence. Participants compete in a real effort task and then their success or failure is attributed to one of three causal attributions. We find significant gender differences in competition persistence when failure is attributed to a lack of ability, with women dropping out more. On the contrary, when suggested that failure was due to lack of luck, women's competition persistence after failure increases relative to men. We find no gender difference when failure is attributed to a lack of effort. Our findings have important implications for designing feedback mechanisms to reduce the gender gap in competitive domains.

Keywords: decision analysis; competition; gender gap; performance feedback; laboratory experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D03 J24 M50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2020-10-19
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent, nep-exp, nep-gen, nep-hrm and nep-lma
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kud:kucebi:2025

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