 From Micro to Macro Gender Differences: Evidence from Field TournamentsJosé De Sousa () and Guillaume Hollard Post-Print from HAL Abstract: We document that women compete worse against men in field tournaments in over 150 countries and across all ages. Our field setting is the game of chess and we benefit from a large and rich data set to investigate the robustness and heterogeneity of our uncovered gender differences in competition. We find a macro gender gap in every country: there are fewer female than male players, especially at the top, and women have lower average rankings. Moreover, comparing millions of individual games, we find a small but robust micro gender gap: women's scores are about 2% lower than expected when playing a man rather than a woman with an identical rating, age and country. Using a simple theoretical model, we show how this small micro gap may affect women's long-run human-capital formation. By reducing effort and increasing the probability of quitting, both effects accumulate to explain a larger share of the macro gap. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Supplemental Material: The e-companion and data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4541 . Date: 2023-06 Published in Management Science, 2023, 69 (6), pp.3358-3399. ⟨10.1287/mnsc.2022.4541⟩ There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it. Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04328086 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Post-Print from HAL |
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