Are women perhaps less competitive than men, and are therefore skipped for higher positions with higher salaries? A new study suggests it probably isn't that simple. Researchers found that women enter competitions at the same pace as men – when they have the opportunity to split their winnings with the losers.
The study was conducted by Mary L. Rigdon, associate director of the UArizona Center for the Philosophy of Freedom, and Alessandra Cassar, professor of economics at the University of San Francisco.
Rigdon's research studies how market structure, information and incentives influence behavior. Her work over the past 20 years has explored questions of trust, reciprocity, competition, altruism, cheating and more, with a particular focus on gender differences, especially the gender pay gap.
Rigdon and Cassar addressed the relatively new theory that women are less competitive and less willing to take risks than men.
But if women were more reluctant to compete, they would occupy fewer senior positions at the top of large companies, and that's not the trend that has taken shape in recent years, Rigdon said. Women make up about 8% of Fortune 500 CEOs. While that number is generally low, it is an all-time high.
“We thought it should be like women are just as competitive as men, but they just show it differently, so we wanted to try to understand that story and show that it is,” Rigdon said. “Because that is a completely different story about the pay gap between men and women.”
Rigdon and Cassar randomly assigned 238 participants — almost evenly distributed by gender — to two different groups for the study. Participants in each of those two groups were then randomly assigned to subgroups of four people.
For all participants, the first round of the study was the same:each was asked to look at tables of 12 three-digit numbers with two decimal places and find the two numbers that add up to 10. The participants were asked to solve as many tables as possible — to 20 — in two minutes. Each participant got $2 for each table they solved in the first round.
In round two, the participants were asked to perform the same task, but the two groups were stimulated differently. In the first group, the two participants from each four-man team who solved the most tables earned $4 per resolved table, while their other two team members got nothing. In the other group, the top two players from each four-man team also earned $4 per table, but they had the right to decide how much of the prize money to share with one of the underperforming entrants.
In the third round, all participants were allowed to choose which payment schedule they preferred from the two previous rounds. For half of the study participants, this meant a choice between a guaranteed $2 per correct table, or possibly $4 per correct table if they became one of the top two performers in their four-person subgroup. For the other half of the participants, the choice was $2 per correct table, or $4 per correct table for the top two players with the option to split the winnings with one of the losing participants.
The number of women who chose the competitive option nearly doubled when given the option to share their winnings; about 60% chose to compete under that option, while only about 35% chose to participate in the winner-take-all version of the tournament.
About 51% of the men in the survey chose the winner-take-all option and 52.5% chose the format that allowed for sharing with the losers.
Rigdon said she and Cassar have a few theories about why women are more likely to compete if they can share the profits. It is suggested that female participants are simply interested in controlling how the profits are distributed among the other participants.
Another theory that has emerged among evolutionary psychologists, Rigdon said, suggests that female contestants may have a tendency to flush out bad feelings with competition losers.
“We really need to ask ourselves what it is about this social incentive that drives women to compete. We think it recognizes the different costs and benefits that come from your different biological and cultural constraints,” she said. “But in the end I think we still have this question.”
