Gender, Competition and the Efficiency of Policy Intervention
Loukas Balafoutas and
Matthias Sutter
No 450, Working Papers in Economics from University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics
Abstract:
Recent research has shown that women shy away from competition more often than men. We evaluate experimentally three alternative policy interventions to promote women in competitions: Quotas, Preferential Treatment, and Repetition of the Competition unless a critical number of female winners is reached. We find that Quotas and Preferential Treatment encourage women to compete significantly more often than in a control treatment, while efficiency in selecting the best candidates as winners is not worse. The level of cooperation in a post-competition teamwork task is even higher with successful policy interventions. Hence, policy measures promoting women can have a double dividend.
Keywords: Competition; gender gap; experiment; affirmative action; teamwork; coordination (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D03 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2010-05-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-mic
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)
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http://hdl.handle.net/2077/22369 (text/html)
Related works:
Working Paper: Gender, competition and the efficiency of policy interventions (2010) 
Working Paper: Gender, Competition and the Efficiency of Policy Interventions (2010) 
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:gunwpe:0450
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