Girls’ and Boys’ Performance in Competitions: What We Can Learn from a Korean Quiz Show

Alison Booth and Jungmin Lee

No 13552, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: We compare the performance of high-ability adolescent girls and boys who participated in a a long-running Korean television quiz show. We find there is a gender gap in performance -- in favour of boys -- across episodes of the quiz show. To investigate underlying mechanisms that might explain this, we explore how male and female performance varies under different rules of the game. We find that there are no gender gaps when stress is kept to a minimum -- that is, in games without fastest-finger buzzer, knock-outs or penalties. However, in games with these features, there are significant gender gaps. In addition, we examine performance in Round 2 of the shows, where we find larger gender gaps. These are consistent with girls being increasingly hindered by psychological stress and risk aversion as competition is higher. Finally, we use panel data to estimate performance in the games in which all players stay in for 25 questions. Here we find that girls are less likely to respond faster especially when their winning probability is higher. Further, the gender gap is more salient at the end of the game. The results are also consistent with gendered behavioural responses to psychological pressure.

Keywords: Gender and competition; Tournaments; Psychological pressure; Risk (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D9 I21 J16 L83 M5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gen and nep-spo
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP13552 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

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:cpr:ceprdp:13552

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP13552

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().