When to Compete: Do Women Know Better?

Women are more attuned to competitive environments and change their behavior accordingly, argued Harvard Business School doctoral candidate Pinar Fletcher, at this week’s WAPPP seminar. Titled “Competing at All Costs: Gender and Dysfunctional Competition,” the presentation focused on destructive competitive behavior and how it varies by gender and environment.

Past research featured in a 2013 WAPPP seminar, indicated that there are significant gender differences when it comes to competition. A randomized control trial revealed that 73% of men chose to compete in winner-takes-all competitions for potentially higher pay over working independently for lower pay under piece-rate pay schemes, while just 35% of women chose the winner-takes-all option. Researchers have been trying to explain this gender gap for years now, and Fletcher hopes to use the field of behavioral economics to better explain the issue.

Some arguments frame this gender difference as a problem, arguing that women’s propensity to not compete is a weakness, but Fletcher pointed out that men often lose money by choosing the competitive scheme. Since men are not always benefitting from their higher propensity to compete, it could be useful to examine the competitive context.

Fletcher’s research, which she conducted with coauthor and HBS Professor Kathleen McGinn, looks explicitly at destructive competitive behavior, i.e. competitive behavior that aims to hurt competitor(s) but has the potential to give net losses or net gains to the instigator. In an organizational context, the factors that determine the costs and benefits of destructive competitive behavior are (1) the incentive systems, (2) the performance feedback systems, meaning what your performance is compared to, and (3) behavioral norms of the work environment.

There are two organizational contexts in which this kind of competition can occur: high intensity and low intensity. Low intensity environments are still competitive, but individuals feel that their performance matters regardless of how they compare with others, usually because they receive feedback in relation to how they did over time or based on objective standards. Here, the expected payoff of destructive competitive behavior is uncertain because the costs of competing in that manner outweigh the benefits. High intensity environments are just the opposite, stressing that winning over someone else is key. In these environments, there is more certainty that destructive competition will bring more benefits than costs.

Fletcher’s hypothesis was that the propensity for destructive competitive behavior would be greater in high intensity environments than in low intensity ones but predicted that an interaction between gender and competition intensity would mitigate these differences. The authors predicted that in high intensity situations, the certainty of the expected payoff of competitive behavior would wipe out any gender differences, while in low intensity situations, the ambiguity would allow gender differences to creep back in.

Fletcher and McGinn conducted three randomized control trials involving partnered tasks with varying payment schemes, all of which confirmed these hypotheses. The first and second studies focused on incentive systems and social comparison/performance feedback, while the third study focused on behavioral norms.

The first study, in which everyone was paired with a relatively well-performing competitor, participants were assigned to either a high intensity or low intensity environment and made decisions in “strong” – or certain – contexts as well as “weak” – or ambiguous – contexts. In strong situations with high intensity competitions, men and women competed just as much as men.
In weak situations with low intensity competitions, men performed better than women. However, as Fletcher noted, women’s actual net payoff was greater on average than men’s.

The second study manipulated the incentive scheme and performance feedback type separately to parse apart how men and women reacted differently to incentives. This study replicated the findings of the first study, showing that women change their competitive behavior in response to the environment, while men exhibit the same competitive behavior across conditions. Additionally, men factor in incentive scheme to some extent, but not as well as women do.

The third study revealed that the overwhelming majority (~90%) of destructive competitive behavior was driven by a utilitarian or self-serving justification but that it varied by the competitive behavioral norms of the environment.

In short, men are more likely to engage in reflexive competitive behavior, while women are more context-dependent and attuned to the “rules of the game,” but gender differences in destructive competitive behavior only reveal themselves in low intensity competition settings. In addition, women in high intensity settings perceive their competition to be with female colleagues, while the perception in “low intensity” settings is competition with their male colleagues. Women reap more benefits from destructive competition in high intensity situations, however, so future research looking into women’s advantages in these settings may help organizations perform better. 

Intersectionality at Play: the Parliamentary Representation of Women and Ethnic Minorities

While there has been much research on women’s political representation and ethnic minorities’ political representation, there is very little about the intersection of these two, argued WAPPP Fellow Liza Mügge in this week’s seminar. In her lecture, titled “Gender and Ethnicity in Parliamentary Representation,” Mügge, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam, presented her findings, which are part of a stream of research on gendered representation of minorities.

Professor Mügge explained that parliamentary representation of minority groups is important, both because equal representation is a social justice concern, but also because research shows that having political representation close to actual proportions within the population of a particular society is necessary for that society to remain peaceful.

Mügge conducted an analysis of the makeup of the Dutch Parliament starting in 1986, the year that that the first ethnic minority Member of Parliament (MP) was elected. The analysis focused on both descriptive and substantive representation and named three transition phases for an individual to be elected to office: 1) ineligible to aspirant, 2) aspirant to candidate and 3) candidate to elected. Mügge then used an intersectionality lens to understand why there were many more minority women than men in office in the 1980s and 1990s and how candidates can learn from their specific challenges and successes.

Member of Parliament Sadet Karabulut

In phase one, the primary criterion to transition from ineligible to an aspirant is Dutch citizenship. With a massive increase in naturalization during the 1990s and the fact that post-colonial immigrants were already Dutch citizens, this was not a significant barrier. Education level also factors in, and Mügge argued that part of the success of ethnic minority women is due to the education gender gap: 54% of ethnic minority undergraduate students are female. Ethnic minorities are disadvantaged in labor market participation, and political participation varies greatly by nationality, with Turks and Moroccans’ turnout close to that of those with European ancestry at about 57%, while Antillean immigrants are much lower at 18%.

In the second phase, how diversity is regulated and the availability of identity networks are crucial. The Green Party and Social Democrats have highly institutionalized women sections for networking and strategy and strong, though informal, minority sections. Mügge argued that the gender progressiveness of the Social Democrats especially has spilled over to include ethnic minorities, thereby helping female minority candidates win.

In phase three, the challenge comes down to whether the candidates are given winnable seats. Only 6% of all ethnic minority candidates across the elections studied were in a winnable seat, though there was not a significant difference between male and females candidates. 

Many, but not all, of the factors that boost women’s participation also increase ethnic minority representation. Leftist ideology that has often supported more gender parity in government also supports ethnic minorities in general, but civil society networks work for ethnic minority women much better than for ethnic minority men. 

Mügge concluded by explaining the issue in terms of demand and supply. The large increase of eligible citizens since the 1990s has created MP supply, while changing ideology and the availability of networks has created demand. At the end of the day, the political parties are the most influential gatekeepers, however, and they continue to greatly affect gender and ethnicity representation in Parliament. 

How We're Keeping Girls Out of STEM: Teaching and Messaging

In this week’s WAPPP seminar “Paying the Price for Sugar and Spice: How Girls and Women are Kept out of Mathematics and Science,” Stanford Professor of Mathematics Education Jo Boaler argued that the STEM disciplines are impoverished by the current lack of women’s participation.

Professor Boaler started the seminar by presenting the problem in basic terms: STEM achievement is equal by gender across K-12, but the participation in these areas is not, leading to a significant gender gap. A recent meta-analysis of 259 studies involving three million people revealed that academic achievement in STEM was almost equally split between genders, with girls ahead in 49% of studies and boys ahead in 51% of them.

There is a significant disparity in participation, however. The decline in women earning college degrees in mathematics and computer science in the last two decades has led to severe differences when it comes to PhD attainment, which in turn affect the pipeline for professors and other specialists in these fields.

While some believe that these differences are due to preferences and the gap is therefore not as big of an issue, Boaler argued that girls' choices are restricted by the environments that parents and educators create. She argued that there are two neglected areas that contribute to this gap: 1) teaching and 2) mindset and messaging.

The problem is the current use of traditional instead of inquiry teaching, Boaler argued, saying that mathematics is currently taught dryly. Studies show that when math is taught as a multi-dimensional subject involving inquiry, every student benefits, and the gender gap also disappears. Essentially, girls underachieve and opt out in traditional math classrooms, while boys perform the same in both. 

Beliefs and messages matter as well. This is what Boaler refers to as the elephant in the classroom: the idea that some kids aren’t going to be good at math, no matter what. New knowledge about brain plasticity shows that this isn’t true. If we take the time to learn an issue deeply, our brain makes new connections that can strengthen over time and carry us into adulthood. Boaler explained that this means that no one is born with a “math brain.”

This new neuroscience demonstrates that speed is not necessary or sufficient for learning math and that when we're anxious, our working memory is blocked. In short, stress makes doing math difficult. What’s more, time tests can be the early onset of math anxiety for many students, and this anxiety affects girls worse than boys. Boaler wrote about both these issues for Atlantic last year in a piece entitled “The Stereotypes That Distort How Americans Teach and Learn Math.”

Professor Boaler does not just study this issue, however. She’s also a practitioner. Last year, she created Youcubed, an online portal that provides seminars on how to better learn and teach math. 40,000 people participated in the first course, and by the end of it, 95% of participants said they would change teaching or parenting. This could have huge effects for girls in STEM classrooms.