Option to cooperate increases women's competitiveness and closes the gender gap

Option to cooperate increases women's competitiveness and closes the gender gap. Alessandra Cassar, Mary L. Rigdon. Evolution and Human Behavior, Volume 42, Issue 6, November 2021, Pages 556-572. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2021.06.001

Highlights

• The hypothesis that women have a lower desire to compete than men is investigated through an evolutionary framework.

• Idea embraced as an explanation for why women are a minority in high-ranking economic and political positions.

• Different sexes evolved to pursue different competitive strategies, females focusing competitiveness for offspring benefit.

• Experiment (N = 438 Mturk adults) supports hypothesis that women compete as much as men with prosocial option.

• Result suggests important implications for designing policies to promote gender equality: change the system not the women.

Abstract: We advance the hypothesis that women are as competitive as men once the incentive for winning includes factors that matter to women. Allowing winners an opportunity to share some of their winnings with the low performers has gendered consequences for competitive behavior. We ground our work in an evolutionary framework in which winning competitions brings asymmetric benefits and costs to men and women. In the new environment, the potential to share some of the rewards from competition with others may afford women the benefit of reaping competitive gains without incurring some of its potential costs. An experiment (N = 438 in an online convenience sample of U.S. adults) supports our hypothesis: a 26% gender gap in performance vanishes once a sharing option is included to an otherwise identical winner-take-all incentive scheme. Besides providing a novel experiment that challenges the paradigm that women are not as motivated to compete as men, our work proposes some suggestions for policy: including socially-oriented rewards to contracts may offer a novel tool to close the persistent labor market gender gap.

Keywords: CompetitionTournamentGender differencesSocial rewardDictator game