Gender and Competition at a Young Age

Gender gaps in income and social position are widespread. For example, Marianne Bertrand and Kevin Hallock (2001) studied data on the five highest-paid executives of a large group of U.S. firms over the period 1992–1997. They found that only 2.5 percent of the executives in the sample were women. Such asymmetry has engendered heated controversy about the fairness of the selection process, and more generally about the allocation of opportunities. This controversy is fueled by strong opinions and is not likely to disappear. One of the reasons for such persistence, besides the real interests at stake, is that real-life selection processes bring into play many different factors that are difficult to evaluate separately. Nonetheless, laboratory experiments and field studies can provide precious additional evidence. These gender gaps could be due to easily observable differences in abilities (e.g., the average man is stronger than the average woman). An alternative explanation for the difference is discrimination, for which direct evidence is hard to find (James Heckman, 1998; Heckman and Siegelman, 1993). The gap could also result from gender differences that are unobservable to the econometrician, such as differences in preferences or a lack of long-term commitment from women (Bertrand and Hallock, 2001). In this paper we extend the discussion by testing whether differences in competitiveness exist between men and women, and if so, whether they could help in explaining the gender gap (see also Gneezy et al. [2003], described below). We used a field study in which most of the confounding factors are removed. The results confirm the initial conjecture: competition enhances the performance of males, but not females. A large body of literature in evolutionary biology and sociobiology documents differences in competitiveness between males and females in many species (see Jonathan Knight, 2002). This literature argues that the differences in competitiveness are due to differences in the cost of reproduction: for males, the cost of participating in the reproductive process is very low, and so they will attempt to mate with many partners, and they will compete with other males in order to do so. Females, on the other hand, endure a much higher cost in parental investment and so are inherently much more choosy, rather than competitive.