EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Gender Differences and Dynamics in Competition: The Role of Luck

David Gill and Victoria Prowse

No 564, Economics Series Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics

Abstract: We present experimental evidence which sheds new light on why women may be less competitive than men. Specifically, we observe striking differences in how men and women respond to good and bad luck in a competitive environment. Following a loss, women tend to reduce effort, and the effect is independent of the monetary value of the prize that the women failed to win. Men, on the other hand, reduce effort only after failing to win large prizes. Responses to previous competitve outcomes explain about 11% of the variation that we observe in women's efforts, but only about 4% of the variation in the effort of men, and differential responses to luck account for about half of the gender performance gap in our experiment. These findings help to explain both female underperformance in environments with repeated competition and the tendency for women to select into tournaments at a lower rate than men.

Date: 2011-08-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-lab
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (25)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Journal Article: Gender differences and dynamics in competition: The role of luck (2014) Downloads
Working Paper: Gender Differences and Dynamics in Competition: The Role of Luck (2013) Downloads
Working Paper: Gender differences and dynamics in competition: the role of luck (2012) Downloads
Working Paper: Gender Differences and Dynamics in Competition: The Role of Luck (2010) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oxf:wpaper:564

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Series Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anne Pouliquen ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).

 
Page updated 2025-03-22
Handle: RePEc:oxf:wpaper:564