Should women be encouraged to compete?

An article on “The Confidence Gap” between men and women has been making the rounds this week. In it, Katty Kay and Claire Shipman argue that women too often doubt their own abilities as compared to men, leading to an imbalance in women’s representation in most fields. This may have to do with socialization, evolutionary biology, the structure of our social systems, or some combination.

In his seminar on whether “boys and girls respond differently to academic competition,” Prof. Robert Jensen of the University of Pennsylvania explored how this carries over into the realm of competitiveness. He and his co-authors used a real-life experiment in which a math and verbal prep technology suddenly introduced a peer competition in the form of a “leader board.” Prior to the leader board, students would simply answer a series of questions and be told, individually, how well they’d done. After the “leader board”, students were given points for correct answers and the names of the top-three point-earners were displayed for all the participants to see.

Before the points system, girls tended to perform better in both English and math. But after the introduction of the competitive system, girls performed worse than they previously had, and also worse than boys, particularly in math.

Whether it had to do with social stigma of being publicly seen as a “nerd” or just the aversion to and stress associated with competition is unclear. But Professor Jensen concludes that a competitive system simply wasn’t conducive to better learning outcomes for women in this education technology.

So should we reduce competition in how we raise and educate girls? As one seminar participant remarked, “we live in a society of competition in every sphere; to discourage that is to encourage girls to opt-out of success. Instead, perhaps we should raise our daughters and sons the same way so that they can both learn to compete effectively.” Indeed, as Elizabeth Plank writes, instead of telling women to change their personalities, maybe it's time we take a look at the entire system and adjust all of the structures that hold them back.

To this, WAPPP Executive Director Victoria Budson responds that, “Whenever the frame and context for any competition is set in today’s world, it will necessarily be biased---by gendered components, racial components. So we need to understand  what choices are made and how those choices impact outcomes. It’s not that one shouldn’t compete…but to create a new competitive frame.

“When you understand what the mechanisms are and what they produce, you can then guide how institutions create structures. Because whenever we set up structures, we’re really creating pathways toward outcomes that we can predict when we study them effectively. So rather than telling us how we should feel about this, all of these studies are just data that can help us create a world where the majority of our talent is effectively utilized.”

WAPPP Director Iris Bohnet adds that we should do both: “we should enable people to be competitive in the world that we live in, but we also have to change the world to make it easier for everyone, based on whatever preferences they have, to survive and compete in that world.”

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Empowering Afghan Women

Whispering wind skims sides of sand dunes. A young girl, maybe eight years old, is heaving yellow plastic canisters toward a clay hut. In an Afghan village, where the gray beards make all decisions, fetching water is a girl’s duty. This is one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a woman, but one woman – MIT Professor Fotini Christia – keeps coming back. She has interviewed war lords, studied alliances of Taliban fighters, and now she is surveying villagers to evaluate the impact of the National Solidarity Program.  

The NSP is the largest development program in Afghanistan’s history and is unusually popular. Though it is funded by the World Bank and foreign governments like any other development scheme, the Afghans own the process. Afghan government administers the NSP to 29,000 villages through a system of elected local community development councils (CDCs), which decide on infrastructure projects for their community. These councils are not the usual circles of bearded men. For a village to receive aid, half of the CDC members must be women and at least one project must be targeted to women’s needs.

What is the impact of this program on women in this male-dominated society? That is one of the parameters Professor Christia is evaluating in a randomized field experiment. Because the program could not be delivered to all villages at once, she was able to select 250 villages for the treatment group and 250 similar villages for the control group. Her team of dedicated enumerators trekked to these remote villages to survey and interview residents in 2007, before projects commenced, then in 2009, and finally in 2011 when the projects were completed. The final evaluation results are not yet available, but Professor Christia shared some preliminary findings.

The most hopeful results were in relation to attitudes toward women’s civic participation, socialization and economic activity. Namely, in villages that received the NSP both men and women were more likely to say that women should have input on electing the village head and that there is at least one woman in the community who is well respected by both men and women. These villagers were also less likely to say that women should not have any decision-making roles. Moreover, women in the treatment villages were more likely to have become engaged in an income-generating activity, and to have developed support networks with each other. On the family attitude front, however, no statistically significant differences were observed with regard to women owning assets or being consulted about family spending decisions.

Changing entrenched gender roles is difficult enough at Harvard and MIT, not to mention a conservative village in the heart of a country ravaged by civil war.With that in mind, Professor Christia makes a compelling case that the NSP and the ongoing participation of women in local decisions is critical to moving Afghanistan forward. For instance, in selecting infrastructure projects for their communities, women were more likely than men to invest in wells and schools. Perhaps with a shorter distance to haul water, their daughters will be more likely to go to school.

Anya Malkov is an MPP candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School, a WAPPP Cultural Bridge Fellow, and an alumna of From Harvard Square to the Oval Office.