Don't tell anyone I lost to a girl! Gender stereotypes and hiding low performance

It has been asserted that males incur a psychological cost when they are outperformed by a female competitor. We conduct a laboratory experiment that allows us to measure this cost, for performance in a mathematical task. The experiment is conducted in both the US and China. We find that in our Chinese sample, males are willing to pay more to hide the fact that they have performed worse than another individual than women are, while there is no gender difference in the US. In China, females are willing to pay more to hide poor performance when losing to another female than to a male. In the US, the opposite pattern is observed; women have a greater cost of revealing that they have lost to a man than to another woman. The gender of the counterpart is not a determinant of males\' willingness to hide poor performance. An incentivized questionnaire reveals that a stereotype that males would outperform females exists in the Chinese sample, but not among our American participants.