Gender Differences in Response to Relative Performance Feedback: A Field Experiment in Education

Individuals are influenced by both their absolute performance and their performance relative to others. For example, workers’ satisfaction is affected not only by their nominal wage but also by how their salaries compare to those of their colleagues. We apply these ideas in the context of education. We analyze the effect of delivering relative performance feedback in a field experiment involving more than a thousand university students. We first find that untreated students tend to misperceive their standing in the grade distribution, with underperforming students often overstating their ranking and high-achieving students, particularly women, understating their performance. We experimentally provided treated students with information about their exact performance relative to peers.We find asymmetric effects of information feedback on men and women.Treated men reported increased satisfaction with their GPA, while treated women reported reduced satisfaction, regardless of their position in the grade distribution. Additionally, the non-monetary incentive caused a decline in women’s academic performance after one and two years. Two potential explanatory channels could account for these findings: women may exhibit a tendency to shy away from competition, and they might face an increasing marginal cost of effort. This paper highlights the nuanced impact of information feedback, showing that more information is not always universally beneficial.