Women lean back when representing others in competitions

This study examined the role that being a ‘representative’ plays in competition behavior of women and men through a laboratory experiment where self-representing and other-representing individuals had to decide whether to enter a mix-gender tournament that involved performing in a male-stereotyped task. While self-representing men and women exhibited very similar performance and competitiveness behaviors, women ‘representatives’ leaned back. Controlling for differences in performance, female ‘representatives’ were less likely to enter into competitions than male ‘representatives’ and self-representing women. The leaning back of female ‘representatives’ from competition entry as compared to self-representing women is largely attributed to these women experiencing lower levels of confidence and being less likely to enter a competition when they guessed their performance to be less than the best. Furthermore, compared to male ‘representatives’, female ‘representatives’ were significantly less confident in their abilities, explaining the gender gap in competition entry amongst other-representing individuals.