Gender, Competition, and Managerial Decisions

Recent research has found drastic differences across gender in how performance and preferences are affected by competition. In light of these, this study addresses how gender affects the use of competitive compensation. When given information about worker ability, male managers, but not female managers, are reluctant to choose the tournament for a female worker. The data also show that even though male subjects perform better in the tournament relative to female subjects, and male subjects are generally thought of as higher ability, male subjects performing the task under the tournament perform worse when the choice of compensation is made for them by another subject.