Understanding the gender pay gap: what's competition got to do with it?

Alan Manning and Farzad Saidi

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: A number of papers have recently argued that men and women have different attitudes and behavioural responses to competition. Laboratory experiments suggest that these gender differences are very large but it is important to be able to map these findings into real world differences. In this paper, we use performance pay as an indicator of competition in the workplace and compare the gender gap in incidence of performance pay and earnings and work effort under these contracts. Women are less likely to found in performance pay contracts but the gender gap is small. Furthermore, the effect of performance pay on earnings is modest and does not differ markedly by gender. Consequently the ability of these theories to explain the gender pay gap seems very limited.

Keywords: Gender pay gap; Performance pay (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J31 J33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2008-11
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/28510/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Understanding the Gender Pay Gap: What's Competition Got to Do with it? (2010)
Working Paper: Understanding the Gender Pay Gap: What's Competition Got to Do with It? (2008)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:28510

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