Doctoral Dissertation Research in DRMS: Exploring gender differences in effort before competition

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).

Competitions are increasingly prevalent in the global labor market, where winners are disproportionately rewarded. Prior work has suggested that gender differences in competitiveness, with women being less competitive, on average, than men, may contribute to persistent gender disparities in labor market outcomes. As a result, much of the research on gender differences in competitions has focused on i) understanding the sources of the gender difference and ii) designing interventions to encourage women to compete more.

Less consideration, however, has been paid to whether and how women and men may differently respond to competitions. Because past research suggests that women are less confident and more risk-averse than men, and this may, in part, explain their reluctance to compete, women may spend more time preparing for competitions when they do compete. The first aim of this research is to examine whether women spend more time than men preparing for tasks where their performance will be evaluated, and specifically, when their performance is being evaluated against a competitor.

The second aim of this dissertation is to test whether beliefs about gender differences in performance on a task, which have previously been shown to affect confidence and performance, also affect gender differences in preparation before competition. Experiments are conducted using an online marketplace, where participants are paid for their performance on various tasks.

Understanding how individuals respond to competitive situations may help address economic disparities across groups, including persistent gender differences in labor market outcomes. If, for instance, competitions exacerbate gender differences in the amount of effort exerted (i.e., preparing) before performance, this may affect women’s labor output, career advancement, their ability to achieve a satisfying work-life balance, and even their decision to enter or stay in competitive environments.

As this is a new area of research, there are many promising and exciting avenues for future exploration, all of which have the potential to inform policies that promote greater gender equality.

The researchers hypothesize that women will spend more time preparing than men, especially before competitions, in part because they are, on average, less risk-seeking and confident than men. We will also test boundary conditions of the anticipated interaction by examining how beliefs about gender differences in performance shape decisions to prepare before competitions.

The researchers experimentally test these hypotheses in an online marketplace where participant performance on the task is incentivized. In the first experiment they manipulate whether participants will be paid according to a competitive payment scheme (i.e., incentives for their performance are higher, but they must outperform another individual in the study to earn anything for their performance) or a non-competitive payment scheme (i.e., incentives for their performance are guaranteed, but lower).

Participants will have the option to complete an unlimited amount of practice problems that closely resemble the incentivized task before entering the incentivized stage of the study. In the second experiment, they manipulate participants’ beliefs about gender differences in performance on a task under a competitive payment scheme. Specifically, participants are randomly assigned to learn about results from a scientific article that either i) point to a male advantage or ii) point to a female advantage on the task.

Similar to the first experiment, participants have the option to complete an unlimited amount of practice problems before moving on to the competition. Across both studies, the main dependent variable of interest is amount of time spent preparing for the incentivized task. It is predicted that women will choose to prepare more than men before a competition, especially when they are led to believe that males may have a performance advantage.

The proposed work will advance knowledge by providing the foundation for a fruitful line of work focused on how men and women differently respond to competitions, and its possible economic ramifications for women.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.