Closing the Gender Leadership Gap: Competitive versus Cooperative Institutions

Motivated by the stereotype that women are more cooperative and less competitive, we investigate how the institutional environment impacts the gender leadership gap. An experiment tests leaders’ impact on earnings under competitive (“winner take all”) versus cooperative (equal earnings distribution) incentive schemes. All leaders enhance efficiency similarly, but a gender gap emerges in the competitive context where women receive lower evaluations for identical advice. This bias disappears in the cooperative context where female leaders are evaluated 50% higher, suggesting that congruence between the environment and gender stereotypes has important policy implications. Men are more willing to lead, regardless of context.