Gender and Competition in Adolescence: Task Matter

Anna Dreber, Emma von Essen () and Eva Ranehill

No 2011:14, Research Papers in Economics from Stockholm University, Department of Economics

Abstract: We look at gender differences among adolescents in Sweden in preferences for competition, altruism and risk. For competitiveness, we explore two different tasks that differ in associated stereotypes. We find no gender difference in competitiveness when comparing performance under competition to that without competition. We further find that boys and girls are equally likely to self-select into competition in a verbal task, but that boys are significantly more likely to choose to compete in a mathematical task. This gender gap diminishes and becomes non-significant when we control for actual performance and beliefs about relative performance. These results show that among adolescents in our sample, the gender gap in competitiveness is not due to preferences for competition per se. Girls are also more altruistic and less risk taking than boys.

Keywords: Competitiveness; risk preferences; altruism; adolescents; gender differences; experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D03 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 18 pages
Date: 2011-04-11, Revised 2013-03-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Gender and competition in adolescence: task matters (2014)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:sunrpe:2011_0014

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