Gender Differences in Performance in Competitive Environments? Evidence from Professional Tennis Players

This paper uses detailed stroke-by-stroke data from seven tennis Grand Slam tournaments played between 2006 and 2007 to assess whether men and women respond differently to competitive pressure in a setting with large monetary rewards. At crucial junctures of the match, both men and women adopt a less aggressive playing strategy, meaning that the probability of hitting winning shots and making unforced errors decreases. The conclusion that the playing strategy becomes less aggressive is supported by new instant-by-instant data on the location of strokes: on more important points, players hit strokes that are closer to the center of the court, and clear the net by a higher margin. I argue that, given the observed frequencies of hitting winning shots and unforced errors, moving to a less aggressive strategy represents a deterioration in performance. For both men and women, the probability that a player wins a match against an opponent of equal quality would increase from 0.5 up to as much as 0.75-0.80 if they could play as aggressively on the more important points as on the less important ones. Sensitivity analysis shows that even a modest improvement in performance on more important points could lead to a sizeable increase in match winning probabilities.