Do Women Shy Away From Competition? Do Men Compete Too Much?

Muriel Niederle () and Lise Vesterlund

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2007, vol. 122, issue 3, 1067-1101

Abstract: We examine whether men and women of the same ability differ in their selection into a competitive environment. Participants in a laboratory experiment solve a real task, first under a noncompetitive piece rate and then a competitive tournament incentive scheme. Although there are no gender differences in performance, men select the tournament twice as much as women when choosing their compensation scheme for the next performance. While 73 percent of the men select the tournament, only 35 percent of the women make this choice. This gender gap in tournament entry is not explained by performance, and factors such as risk and feedback aversion only playa negligible role. Instead, the tournament-entry gap is driven by men being more overconfident and by gender differences in preferences for performing in a competition. The result is that women shy away from competition and men embrace it.

Date: 2007
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2260)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1162/qjec.122.3.1067 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Do Women Shy Away From Competition? Do Men Compete Too Much? (2005)
Working Paper: Do Women Shy Away from Competition? Do Men Compete too Much? (2005)
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:oup:qjecon:v:122:y:2007:i:3:p:1067-1101.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is currently edited by Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan Nunn, Andrei Shleifer and Stefanie Stantcheva

More articles in The Quarterly Journal of Economics from President and Fellows of Harvard College
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().