Closing the Gender Leadership Gap: Competitive versus Cooperative Institutions

Catherine Eckel, Lata Gangadharan (), Philip Grossman, Miranda Lambert () and Nina Xue ()
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Lata Gangadharan: Monash University
Miranda Lambert: Texas A&M University
Nina Xue: WU Vienna University of Economics and Business,

No 2025-13, Monash Economics Working Papers from Monash University, Department of Economics

Abstract: Motivated by the stereotype that women are more cooperative and less competitive, we investigate how the institutional environment impacts the gender leadership gap. An experiment tests leaders’ impact on earnings under competitive (“winner take all”) versus cooperative (equal earnings distribution) incentive schemes. All leaders enhance efficiency similarly, but a gender gap emerges in the competitive context where women receive lower evaluations for identical advice. This bias disappears in the cooperative context where female leaders are evaluated 50% higher, suggesting that congruence between the environment and gender stereotypes has important policy implications. Men are more willing to lead, regardless of context.

Keywords: gender; leadership; institutional environment; performance evaluation; lab ex- periment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 D91 J16 J71 M14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-gen, nep-hme and nep-lab
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