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Gender Differences and Dynamics in Competition: The Role of Luck

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Author Info

  • Gill, David

    () (University of Oxford)

  • Prowse, Victoria L.

    () (Cornell University)

Abstract

We present experimental evidence which sheds new light on why women may be less competitive than men. Specifically, we observe striking differences in how men and women respond to good and bad luck in a competitive environment. Following a loss, women tend to reduce effort, and the effect is independent of the monetary value of the prize that the women failed to win. Men, on the other hand, reduce effort only after failing to win large prizes. Responses to previous competitive outcomes explain about 11% of the variation that we observe in women's efforts, but only about 4% of the variation in the effort of men, and differential responses to luck account for about half of the gender performance gap in our experiment. These findings help to explain both female underperformance in environments with repeated competition and the tendency for women to select into tournaments at a lower rate than men.

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Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in its series IZA Discussion Papers with number 5022.

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Length: 30 pages
Date of creation: Jun 2010
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp5022

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Related research

Keywords: behavioral preferences; real effort experiment; gender differences; gender gap; competition; competition aversion; tournament; luck; win; loss; narrow framing;

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Cited by:
  1. Nagore Iriberri & Pedro Rey-Biel, 2011. "Let's (not) talk about sex: The effect of information provision on gender differences in performance under competition," Economics Working Papers 1288, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
  2. Philipp Doerrenberg & Denvil Duncan, 2012. "Experimental Evidence on the Relationship between Tax Evasion Opportunities and Labor Supply," Cologne Graduate School Working Paper Series 03-10, Cologne Graduate School in Management, Economics and Social Sciences.
  3. Gill, David & Prowse, Victoria, 2011. "A novel computerized real effort task based on sliders," Discussion Paper Series In Economics And Econometrics 1101, Economics Division, School of Social Sciences, University of Southampton.
  4. Miguel A. Costa-Gomes & Steffen Huck & Georg Weizsäcker, 2010. "Beliefs and Actions in the Trust Game: Creating Instrumental Variables to Estimate the Causal Effect," Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin 969, DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research.
  5. Frick, Bernd, 2011. "Gender differences in competitiveness: Empirical evidence from professional distance running," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 18(3), pages 389-398, June.

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