There is an array of research that demonstrates that men are more competitive than women (and boys are more competitive than girls; e.g. see here). This effect has been amply demonstrated in laboratory experiments for example (e.g. see here). In a recent article published in the journal PLoS ONE (open access, with a non-technical summary on The Conversation), Alessandra Cassar (University of San Francisco) and Mary Rigdon (University of Arizona) investigated whether the gender gap in competitiveness in laboratory contexts arises from the payoff structure of those experiments. Cassar and Rigdon argue that:
...women may be just as competitive as men, if the incentives involved reflect the social environment.
In their experiment, which was undertaken with 238 undergraduate students at Chapman University; University of California, Santa Cruz; and Simon Fraser University, Cassar and Rigdon:
...focus on one such scenario in which the prize for winning a tournament includes a social dimension: Winners have the option to share some of the prize with one of the losers. This prosocial option, known to the participants ahead of the competition, may appeal to women who are motivated to gain control of the distribution of resources or to repair social connections post-competition.
Research participants were:
...randomly assigned to one of two treatments: Baseline or Dictator. Each treatment consists of three rounds of a real effort task, the matrix search, under varying payment schemes: a piece rate per correct answer (round 1), a mandatory tournament where all subjects experience the competitive environment (round 2), and a choice between being paid according the piece-rate scheme or the tournament scheme (round 3).
Cassar and Rigdon then look at differences in the choices made in Round 3 of the experiment, between those who won were able to share some of the proceeds of the task with others (the 'Dictator' treatment, named after the 'Dictator Game'), and those who didn't get the option to share (the 'Baseline' treatment). The outcome is well-summarised by Figure 1 in the paper (which shows the proportion of male and female participants who chose the tournament rather than the piece rate in Round 3 of the experiment):
Women are clearly more competitive (more willing to choose the tournament rather than the piece rate) in the Dictator treatment than in the Baseline treatment. This difference is highly statistically significant, and in further analysis:
...controlling for these differences in individual abilities (using performance in the mandatory round 2 tournament), risk preferences, and beliefs explains some of the gender gap in competitiveness, but leaves the interaction effect of gender and treatment reported in model 1 largely unchanged and equally significant...
So, changing the context of the reward scheme can change the incentives such that women are just as competitive as men. The question now is, how can this be translated to real-world contexts (such as tournaments in the labour market or in education)?
[HT: The Conversation]
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