Economic Trends By Gene Koretz
Are Women Less Competitive?
Although women have made huge strides in catching up with men in the workplace, a gender gap persists both in wages and levels of advancement. Commonly cited explanations for this gap range from charges of sex discrimination to claims that women are more sensitive than men to work-family conflicts and thus less inclined to make sacrifices for their careers.
Now, however, two new studies by economists Uri Gneezy of the University of Chicago and Aldo Rustichini of the University of Minnesota suggest that another factor may be at work: a deeply ingrained difference in the way men and women react to competition that manifests itself even at an early age.
The first study focused on short races run by some 140 9- and 10-year-old boys and girls in a physical education class. At that age, there was no significant difference between the average speeds of boys and girls when each child ran the course alone. But when pairs of children with similar initial speeds ran the race again, things changed. Boys' speeds increased appreciably when running against either a boy or a girl, but more so when paired with a girl. Girls showed no increase when running against a boy, and even ran a bit more slowly when paired with a girl.
The second study, by Gneezy, Rustichini, and Muriel Niederle of Stanford University, involved several hundred students at an elite Israeli technical university. Groups of six students were paid to solve simple maze problems on a computer. In some groups, subjects were paid 50 cents for each problem they solved during the experiment. In others, only the person solving the most problems got rewarded--but at the rate of $3 for each maze solved. Regardless of the sexual makeup of the groups, men and women, on average, did equally well when students were paid for their own performance. But when only the top student was paid, average male performance rose sharply--by about 50%--while female performance remained the same.
The authors conclude that females tend to be far less responsive to competition than males--a tendency with important implications for women and business. It may hurt women in highly competitive labor markets, for example, and hamper efficient job placement--especially for positions in which competitiveness is not a useful trait.
That's something companies with highly competitive atmospheres may need to consider, says Rustichini. If they don't, the results could be "both a subtle bias against women and, in many cases, foregone worker productivity."