Gender, choice of task, and the effect of feedback on competition: An experiment

Alexandra Baier, Brent Davis and Tarek Jaber-Lopez

Journal of Economic Psychology, 2024, vol. 103, issue C

Abstract: We conduct a laboratory experiment to examine gender differences in task choices and competitiveness: Individuals have the option to self-select into one of two stereotypically different tasks and subsequently decide whether or not to engage in competition while receiving one of three different feedback treatments. Compared to a control setting, we study the effect of providing relative performance feedback (rankings), and additionally the effect of providing information about the gender of the competitors. We find a significant gender gap in the choice of the male task, only when presenting the ranking in addition to the gender composition of the group. Turning to the decision to enter competition, we observe that task choice, combined with ranking feedback on performance, reduces the gender gap in competition entry in both tasks compared to the control. The dynamics over treatments reveal that men primarily respond to feedback in the male task, while women respond to feedback in the word task. These findings highlight that gender differences in task choice and competitiveness are contingent on feedback, the underlying task, and the task choice set.

Keywords: Competitiveness; Gender differences; Experiment; Feedback; Task choice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D03 J16 J31 M52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167487024000515
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:eee:joepsy:v:103:y:2024:i:c:s0167487024000515

DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2024.102743

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Psychology is currently edited by G. Antonides and D. Read

More articles in Journal of Economic Psychology from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().