Gender differences in willingness to compete: The role of public observability

Thomas Buser, Eva Ranehill and Roel van Veldhuizen

Journal of Economic Psychology, 2021, vol. 83, issue C

Abstract: A recent literature emphasizes that gender differences in the labor market may in part be driven by a gender gap in willingness to compete. However, whereas experiments in this literature typically investigate willingness to compete in private environments, real world competitions often have a more public nature, which introduces potential social image concerns. If such image concerns are important, and men and women differ in the degree to which they want to be seen as competitive, making tournament entry decisions publicly observable may further exacerbate the gender gap. We test this prediction using a laboratory experiment (N = 784) that varies the degree to which the decision to compete, and its outcome, is publicly observable. We find that public observability does not alter the magnitude of the gender gap in willingness to compete in an economically or statistically significant way.

Keywords: Gender differences; Competitiveness; Social image; Experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D03 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167487021000064
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Journal Article: Gender differences in willingness to compete: The role of public observability (2021)
Working Paper: Gender Differences in Willingness to Compete: The Role of Public Observability (2017)
Working Paper: Gender differences in willingness to compete: The role of public observability (2017)
Working Paper: Gender differences in willingness to compete: the role of public observability (2017)
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:83:y:2021:i:c:s0167487021000064

DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2021.102366

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 ().