Recent Research:Where Are the Women? Not in the Competitive Game, Says NBER

Do women shy away from competition? Do men compete too much? In a recent working paper published by the National Bureau of Economics Research (NBER), economists Muriel Niederle and Lise Vesterlund answer yes to both questions after measuring performance and preferences of men and women in a controlled environment.

Niederle and Vesterlund test individuals on their ability to add sums where payments benefit high-performing individuals who select a competitive "tournament" scheme rather than a per-piece payment. More than half of the women select the noncompetitive option, even when they would have likely garnered more earnings under the tournament. Conversely, twice as many men chose the tournament even when past performance indicated the likelihood of no earnings under this choice.

The task was performed equally well by men and women under both schemes. Selection of a competitive payment did not affect the choice and potential payment of other participants. The authors tested various reasons for the gender gap, including risk aversion, confidence, avoidance of competitive performance, and belief of relative rankings.

Niederle and Vesterlund found that men were overconfident, rating their ability more highly than women rated theirs regardless of actual performance. However, this overconfidence only explains part of the gender gap. Women passed up the larger financial reward even when they performed the task well in previous tests and did not need to perform it again.

Could these attitudes about competition explain the dearth of women in top corporate management, boardrooms, scientific research, and tech-based careers? Something to consider the next time a company, organization or large research university asks, "Where are the women?"

Do Women Shy Away from Competition? Do Men Compete Too Much? is available at http://www.nber.org/papers/W11474.

We'll be exploring the issue of where the women are in relation to entrepreneurship in science and technology in one of the sessions at SSTI's 9th Annual Conference, Investing in a Brighter Future: Building Tech-based Economies, in Atlanta on October 20-21. Presenters for the session include: Jiahong Juda of the Women Entrepreneurs in Science & Technology (WEST), which is working with women scientists from academia, corporations and entrepreneurship to provide women with another career option: entrepreneurship; and, Nancy Sullivan from the Center for Women Entrepreneurs in Technology at Northwestern University, which provides access to resources, training, and networks to enable women to turn innovative ideas into companies. For more information on SSTI's Conference, go to: http://www.ssti.org/conference05.htm