Gender differences in the willingness to compete against a standard

Gender differences in the willingness to compete against a standard

by Maria Cubel (City University London)

You may follow the seminar at the following link: https://unibocconi-it.zoom.us/j/91555635112

ABSTRACT:

There is extensive evidence showing that women shy away from competition against others and that men compete too much (Niederle and Vesterlund, 2017). In many instances, however, individuals perform against a standard of excellence set by others. They must satisfy that standard in order to obtain increased rewards. In this paper, we explore the existence of gender differences in competition against a standard by means of a laboratory experiment. Participants answer two rounds of a multiple-choice test on basic economic principles. After the first round, they are given feedback on whether they have surpassed the top quartile performance threshold set by a reference group. Before answering a second multiple-choice test they must choose their payment scheme in that round. They can choose between a piece rate per correct answer, or a scheme where the piece rate is quadrupled if their performance is above the top quartile threshold set by the reference group and zero otherwise. In addition to a control treatment with no feedback, we implement three treatments with feedback but where the standard is different: the actual top quartile performance of a previous group of peers, the top quartile performance expected by peers and the one expected by a group of professors in economics from the same university as the participants. We find that women are less prone to compete against the standard in the absence of feedback. The gap closes when feedback is provided, and the standard is set by peers but widens again if the standard is set by experts. Our results are useful to understand gender differences in self-promotion and how feedback could be employed to reduce these gender differences.

BIO:

Maria Cubel is Associate Professor at the Department of Economics of City University London. Her research interests are in the fields of Applied Microeconomics and Experimental Economics with a particular focus on Labour and Gender Economics, Public Economics and Conflict.  Her recent work focuses on the study of gender differences in performance under competition and gender differences in strategic sophistication. Maria is Associate Editor at the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of Pittsburgh, University of Technology Sydney, the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance (Munich), and the University of New South Wales. Her work has been featured in the Daily Mail, The Conversation, LSE Business Review and Voxeu.