Gender Di erences in Competitive Inclination and Educational Outcomes: Evidence from Three Ethnic Groups

Recent experimental techniques that isolate the preference for competition has found men to be much more competitively inclined than women (Niederle and Vesterlund, 2007). This evidence leads to an intriguing hypothesis: gender di erences in competitive inclination can explain gender inequality in economic outcomes, such as those in a developing countries context. This paper rst tests whether experimentally derived measures of competitive inclination can explain a real world choice to compete. I nd that competitive inclination has signi cant explanatory power for the decision to take a competitive high school entrance exam, a decision with serious consequences for my subject pool of rural Chinese middle school students. Second, this paper explores cultural determinants of gender di erences in competitive inclination. The subjects come from neighboring matrilineal and patrilineal societies that exhibit gender bias in child preference. Surprisingly, gender di erences in competitive inclination are small compared to evidence from the US, and if anything, the largest di erences are found in the matrilineal group.