This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: New behavioral economics research on gender and competition, using bidding experiments, finds no overall gender gap in competitiveness; where a gap does appear, it is women who push hardest for the highest positions. Previous research in this category employed real-effort tasks, which often asked people whether they wanted to compete or withdraw from competing for a fixed amount of money; the competitions involved completing tasks in the lab in a short time.
"Women usually choose to compete less, but it's a very peculiar type of setting," says Andrej Angelovski, associate professor in economics at the International Business School Suzhou, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU), and corresponding author of the paper. The study was co-authored with Jordi Brandts from the Barcelona School of Economics, Spain, and Werner Güth from the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Germany. The research is published in Theory and Decision journal.
Unlike previous research methods, this study's auction-style approach measures competitiveness by the extent to which people are willing to sacrifice to attain their target position. The auction, which lasts 32 rounds, asks participants to bid for jobs with different positions and salaries. Participants submit bids in Experimental Currency Units (ECU), which were converted into real euros at the end of the experiment at a rate of 10 ECU = 1 euro.
Their bid represents the maximum resources (i.e., effort, training, time) they are willing to sacrifice from a position's fixed salary to secure it. The experiment employs a "second-price" system, meaning that if someone wins a bid, they pay the second-highest bid in their group. The method was designed to encourage participants to bid their true valuation of a job.
Ultimately, a participant's profit is the position's fixed salary minus the price or, if they fail to obtain a job, a default payment of 50 ECU. Participants were placed either in flatter companies, where there is no large salary difference between the bottom and top positions, or in steep companies, where there is a large salary discrepancy between levels. The study progressed from Phase 1, where small groups of four competed within their own firm, to Phase 2, where groups merged into a larger market of eight to compete for any available spot.
The findings are surprising: Unlike in previous experiments, women behave just as competitively as men, if not more aggressively in some cases. "Now that we've changed how we study competition, we find the typical results no longer hold," Angelovski says. "We do not find a large difference in competitiveness." In general, both genders exhibit strong underbidding for top positions and a preference for middle positions in both flat and steep firms, with no major differences between men and women.
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