Gender Differences in Willingness to Compete: The Role of Culture and In- stitutions Short Title: Culture and Gender Gaps in Competition

Our Beijing-based laboratory experiment investigated gender differences in competitive choices across different birth-cohorts experiencing during their crucial developmental-age different institutions and social norms. To control for general time trends, we use Taipei counterpart subjects with identical original Confucian traditions. Our findings confirm that exposure to different institutions/norms during crucial developmental-ages significantly changes individuals’ behaviour. In particular, Beijing females growing up during the communist regime are more competitively inclined than their male counterparts; their female counterparts growing up during the market regime; and Taipei females. For Taipei, there are no statisticallysignificant cohort or gender differences in willingness to compete. Gender gaps in labour market outcomes can be observed in most societies regardless of their stage of development. Recent studies have linked such phenomena with gender behavioural difference in the willingness to compete (e.g., Gneezy et al., 2003; Gneezy and Rustichini, 2004; Niederle and Vesterlund, 2007). The question then arises as to what determines male and female differences in competitive inclination. Economists have not reached consensus over this issue. Many studies believed that this is due mainly to nature: women and men are built differently. For example, there is some evidence that the menstrual cycle and hormone level affects competition inclination (see, for example, Buser, 2012). Moreover, in some societies the gender gap in competition inclination is We would like to thank James Jilu Zhang for excellent research assistance. We would also like to thank Anpeng Li who provided data extracted from “People’s Daily” for Figure 1. Funding from the Australian Research Council, the College of Business and Economics at ANU, and National Taiwan University is gratefully acknowledged. Ethics approval for the experiment was obtained from the Ethics Committee of the Australian National University and that of National Taiwan University. Thanks also to Bob Gregory, Sen Xue, and seminar participants at the Australian National University, Deakin University, University of Western Australia, and at the meetings of the European Association of Labour Economics in Ghent. Corresponding author: Xin Meng, Research School of Economics, College of Business and Economics, the Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia. [email protected]