Gender Differences in Self and Other-Competition with Johanna Mollerstrom

There is a well-established literature demonstrating that women are less likely to choose to enter competitive settings, even when they are just as able as their would-be competitors. While most of these experiments have been conducted in a laboratory setting, different views toward competition have obvious implications for life outside the lab, including education and career trajectories. However, there has not been a similar investigation about women’s attitudes toward self-competition – are women more or less willing to compete against their own previous scores over time? Johanna Mollerstrom, Professor of Economics at Humboldt University, presented the results of three recent experiments on self- and other-competition.

In existing studies, there are generally two mechanisms underlying women’s differential interest in competition: women may be more risk-averse, or they may be less (over-?) confident than men. With self-competition, risk aversion and confidence take on slightly different valences: it’s still risky to compete against yourself, but risk based on the uncertainty of who you’ll be competing against is alleviated. Similarly, confidence may shift when individuals only have to assess their own capacity to improve on previous rounds. There are reasons to believe that self-competition may be different.

STUDY ONE

The first study was a simple lab experiment designed to test whether there is a gender difference in willingness to self-compete. Participants were asked to add up as many sets of five two-digit numbers as possible in a five-minute period. In the first round, participants were paid a piece rate of $1 for every correct problem. In the second round, participants were either randomly matched with another participant for a competition round or competed against their own first-round score. The winner of the round (either defeating their opponent or their first-round score) got $2 per correct problem. In the third round, participants got a choice between the piece rate and competition, and then were asked a few questions about their risk aversion and confidence. Half of the participants in round three could choose to opt into another other-competition round, while the other half competed against their own scores in round two.

In the other-competition condition, women were less willing to compete than equally-able men, but the difference disappears when controlling for risk aversion and confidence. This finding replicates many past experiments. In the self-competition condition, we see much the same result; risk aversion, in particular, seems to moderate any observed gender difference in willingness to compete. However, this particular experiment had a smaller sample size (N = 200), and a larger sample may indicate that there is no gender difference in willingness to self-compete at all.

STUDY TWO

The second study recruited a larger sample on MTurk and replicated the first study with a few modifications. The task was changed to a captcha-style exercise rather than addition, and the rounds were shortened to 90 seconds to conform to other online experiments. In addition, the researchers added two additional treatments, manipulating whether other-competitors were matched with someone of the same or opposite sex, while holding constant that they were matched with someone who answered the same number of questions correctly in the first round.

The results of this experiment demonstrated that, again, women were less willing to compete against others, but that the gender difference was moderated by differences in confidence and risk aversion. This experiment revealed a much more precise result for self-competition: there is no significant gender difference in willing to self-compete, though confidence and risk aversion still impact this result. It seems that confidence may play a larger role in decision to compete against others than onself.

Interestingly, when matched with a competitor with the same gender and ability level, women are still less willing to compete than men. In other studies, researchers have found that female-only groups are more willing to compete, but this was not the case in this experiment.

Further, when matched with a competitor of the opposite gender and same ability level, the researchers did not observe a significant gender difference in willingness to compete. It may be that this condition provided better information – competitors did not have to think about how good their competition was, which may have provided a confidence boost (or alleviated some of the risk of competition) and eliminated the gender difference. In both the self- and other-competition conditions, men were less risk-averse than women. However, men were more confident in the other-competition condition; in the self-competition condition, there was no gender difference in confidence.

STUDY THREE

The first two studies permitted participants to choose whether they wanted to compete; in the third study, participants were forced to compete, but were permitted to choose between self- and other-competition.

In treatment one, participants got the piece rate, then either self-competition or other-competition in randomized order. Finally, participants were able to choose between each of the three options. In treatment two, the fourth round was set up so that participants had to compete, but could chose self- or other-competition. In treatment three, participants didn’t experience self-competition at all: they did two piece rate rounds, and then could choose piece rate or other-competition. In treatment four, participants complete two piece rate rounds, then self-competition, and then in the final round could opt to compete against others.

In treatment one, a large proportion of participants (of both genders!) chose the piece rate. The two competition types seem to be roughly equally popular. In treatment two, when forced to compete, self-competition was much more popular than other-competition. This finding supports the hypothesis that individuals are better able to assess their own capabilities and performance, and may be able to intuit that they can improve a great deal in another round of self-competition.

Having experienced self-competition does not change women’s propensity to choose other-competition. Interestingly, having experienced self-competition makes men less likely to choose other-competition. While this finding may have something to do with how men think about confidence, the researchers did not have an ex ante hypothesis that would explain this result, which is an interesting avenue for future research.

The researchers also sought to decompose confidence by giving each participant a ratio of “how many tasks do you think you completed correctly” over “how many tasks do you think others completed correctly.” In other-competition, men were significantly overconfident and women were significantly underconfident. However, in self-competition, there was no significant gender difference in confidence. Men are more sure that they will beat another person that they are sure that they will beat themselves, while women are more confident in their ability to improve over time rather than beat another person. Men and women are about equally good at assessing their own performance, but women tend to overestimate (and men to underestimate) how well others do. This finding may have relevance for giving feedback: to encourage women, it may be better to tell them “others are not as good as you think” than “you’re better than you think.”

The researchers also examined causal attributions of performance, asking participants on a 1-10 scale whether their performance was “only due to factors I could control” to “only things I could not control.” In self-competition, there was no gender difference in causal attribution – unsurprisingly, all participants attributed self-competition more to factors they could control. In the other-competition condition, women were slightly more likely to think that the result was due to uncontrollable factors. This effect was especially pronounced for participants who believed that they’d won the round: women who believe that they’d won thought that their victory was based on factors that they could not control, such as luck in who they were matched to compete against.

In terms of future research directions, Professor Mollerstrom and her colleagues are interested in whether, if participants know they will be competing against themselves, they undercompete in round one. If so, this finding may limit the contexts in which self-competition would be appropriate. Alternatively, properly calibrated pre-set goals may be an effective middle ground between self- and other-competition. There is a great deal of room to think about how to use competitive institutions – not just other-competition—in more gender-neutral ways that nevertheless preserve the performance-boosting properties of competition.

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. 

How ‘No’ Can Get Women to the Top

For the past decade and a half, scholars have examined why American women are in very few corporate managerial positions compared to their male counterparts, despite representing 30% of elite MBA programs. The disparity is usually explained in several ways: (1) women have different job preferences, (2) women and men have performance differences when it comes to managerial tasks (i.e. women aren’t as good at these jobs), and (3) women face discrimination in the workplace, which prevents them from getting to the top. Recently, however, some researchers have begun to explain the problem with a bit more nuance.

Lise Vesterlund, an Economics Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, discussed an alternative theory based on research she conducted with coauthors Linda Babcock and Laurie Weingart, both professors at Carnegie Mellon University. In this week’s seminar, Breaking the Glass Ceiling with “No”: Gender Differences in Declining Requests for Non-Promotable Tasks, Professor Vesterlund looked at the assignment of undesirable tasks to better understand the issue.

She based her research on the premise that employees who accept more non-promotable tasks are promoted less often. A survey she conducted among MBA students indicated that women were more likely than men to accept such tasks, largely due to fear of the professional consequences of saying "no." As an economics professor, Vesterlund wanted to look at both the potential demand and supply side causes of this gap. The demand side is whether women are asked to perform non-promotable tasks more often than men, while the supply side is women’s response to such requests.

In a study involving freshmen and sophomores at Carnegie Mellon, Vesterlund et al placed students in random, anonymous groups of three, where they were tasked with hitting a button to make an “investment” that benefitted every member of the group, but gave the least to the individual who actually hit the button. This action represented a non-promotable, undesirable task in a corporate setting that needed to be completed despite no one wanting to do it. In a second part of the study, students had to ask another member of their group to hit the button for them.

The results revealed that both the demand and supply sides of this issue were to blame. While the vast majority of students pressed the button in the last possible seconds of each round – revealing that they were likely motivated by desperate self-interest and not altruism – women pressed the button significantly more often than men. In the second part of the study, Vesterlund also found that both men and women were more likely to ask a woman in their group to hit the button. In response to this, female participants complied 75% of the times that they were asked, while male participants’ decisions were split 50/50.

Vesterlund argued that since beliefs about women’s propensity to accept non-promotable tasks are central to this problem, women saying “no” more often might actually make a significant difference. She also suggested that some simple institutional changes, such as random assignment to event planning, committees, and other undesirable tasks, could allow women to take on more promotable assignments.

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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Are Women Punished for Seeking Power?

One of the catch-22s of gender relations these days is that women are hemmed by both realistic power structures that do exist, as well as by perceptions of what ‘should’ exist.

Specifically regarding gender stereotypes, many people expect not only that women are more modest in their presentation and interactions, but that they should be more modest.

So what happens when women violate these stereotypes?

That was the question that Professor Victoria Briscoll of Yale University posed in her seminar on “Women and Power: Hard to Earn, Difficult to Signal, and Easy to Lose.” She broke her answer into three parts.

First, women often have to manage people’s impressions of their rise to power. Their intention of seeking power and authority appear inconsistent with people’s perceptions that women should be communal and not dominating. So even female politicians like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Patty Murray, who are essentially in the business of power, often downplay the fact that they are there, insisting that they “never expected to run for office.”

Second, once in power, men and women often communicate differently to continue this impression management. According to a great deal of social psychological research, ‘powerful’ people are often given a license to talk more than people with less power, who signal deference. Moreover, women tend to lead in more democratic, non-hierarchical fashions than men. So in spaces like the US Senate floor, men talk to display power, while women tend to talk to establish and maintain relationships and advocate for communal rather than personal causes. This is often in the effort to avoid backlash.



Finally, women’s power is often more fragile and easily lost than that of men. In the case of expressing anger, women are almost always penalized for this, while angry white men are sometimes rewarded for being assertive. But when women can explain their anger away to an external source, women are rewarded.

So clearly there’s a lot of work for society to do. To get there, do women need to keep on adjusting what they do? How can we get societal expectations to change in the long run?

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Why (and how) we shouldn't have it all

Debates over whether women should lean in, lean out, have it all or just some have been raging over the last few years, with few clear answers. Should women emulate men? Adjust what they’re doing to gain power? Opt out entirely?

At this week’s WAPPP Seminar on “Different Ways of Not Having It All: Work, Care, and Gender Change in the New Economy,” NYU Sociologist Kathleen Gerson suggests that the answers can’t, and shouldn’t be that simple.

While women have made tremendous strides in the workplace and at home, we’re entering a whole new economic era, where the boundaries between work and home, local and global job markets, and part and full-time work are all blurring---to say nothing of changing gender norms in most vocations.

Meanwhile, even household norms are changing, with more women working outside the home even through a child’s life, work tensions affecting marital relationships, and greater expectations of parental involvement throughout a child’s life.

As a result, both economics and home life are changing and becoming even less secure: careers aren't quite the linear, predictable paths they used to be, nor are household expectations of, and demands on both partners.

There are three main ways that people are thinking about these changes:

• “Neotraditional” arrangements, in which both partners work and are committed to one another, but one partner “specializes” in care, while the other “specializes” in breadwinning
• “Self-Reliance,” where, even in committed relationships, both partners work to provide money and care in equal doses---without counting on the other.
• and “Gender flexibility,” in which there is an egalitarian sharing of earning and caretaking, but a vague meaning of equality: care and breadwinning are responsibilities assigned not by gender, just what needs to be done

Both men and women would prefer gender-flexibility as an ideal arrangement. But in practice, women tend to fall back to more self-reliant positions, while men reflexively tend toward neotraditional arrangements. This is partly because men are still under the subtle yet profound pressure of the male breadwinner ideal: a man who can’t support his family is unmarriageable and “isn’t a man.” Even equality is seen as chivalrous: “equality means the woman has a choice; but I don’t.”

In practice, a third of people are “neotraditionalists,” with fathers left managing time-demanding jobs. About a third of people are “on their own,” and are left to rear children by themselves or without a committed partner. One of six couples have reversed traditional roles, with women providing more financially, but this leading to resentment in the relationship. And another sixth are “equal, but exhausted.”

At the end of the day, these choices are not about gender, but universal hopes to have a balanced life with predictable work and secure relationships---all permutations of which will require trade-offs. The erosion of job and relationship security are permanent conditions with which we must all contend; to do so we may have to redefine the responsibilities of being a man and a woman in the modern world.




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Are Women Less Competitive Than Men?

A recent New York Times article asks, “Why are there still so few women in science?” Focusing on American society, the article explores some of our cultural biases related to women in science. The TV show “The Big Bang Theory,” for example, features a crew of geeky men with physics PhDs with a few token women (the “hip” ones are all math duds), while in the movie “Mean Girls,” the female lead hides her mathematical talent to impress a boy and fit in.

But does it start even earlier? In Thursday’s WAPPP Seminar, “Gender,Competitiveness, and Career Choices,” Stanford University’s Muriel Niederle, presented some of her research on whether there are some non-cognitive reasons: do women simply shy away from competition? Do men compete too much?

In her experiments of simple math competitions, Professor Niederle found that even the lowest performing (i.e. “stupidest”) men were much more willing to join a competitive game with rewards than even the smartest women. In fact, 73% of all men chose to enter the competition while only 35% of all women did. (There was pretty much an even distribution in peoples’ actual results and intelligence, by the way).

Muriel Niederle, “Gender, Competitiveness, and Career Choices”

What adds to this are a few factors: women tend to be more risk-averse generally; and despite their objective talent, women also tend to rate themselves as lower than they are. And though these tests were done on college students, apparently similar trends on willingness to compete are visible by age three!

Though proclivity to compete with other people per se ought not determine aptitude and success, the reality is that it does. In the classroom, this has path-dependent effects: how young women perceive themselves to be at math influences which course of study, and later career, they pursue. And years later, we see the effect of that in the paucity of women in math and science---but not in subjects like literature.

Some fields have had lower and harder glass ceilings than others. The reason for that may certainly be structural, in terms of decision-makers denying career mobility. But those structures start to oscillate based on the stories we tell ourselves and each other. Eileen Pollack, the author of that Times piece, writes that “the most powerful determinant of whether a woman goes on in science might be whether anyone encourages her to go on.”



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Under Pressure!

Papers, finals, job search, the holidays – the pressure of it all! I was hoping to learn in this seminar that being a woman would somehow improve my performance. What I did learn was not quite so straightforward, but still fascinating. Some experimental studies in recent years had found that in a mixed-sex environment, the pressure of competition improved men’s performance, but not women’s, and that women often opted out of competitive environments. Olga Shruchkov, Assistant Professor of Economics at Wellesley College, noticed something about those experiments. The “tasks” which subjects performed under competitive pressure were invariably math-oriented, like addition problems and mazes, and there was no range of performance quality, only right or wrong answers.

Shruchkov designed an experiment that would fill these gaps – a Boggle-like verbal task, a comparable math task and a difference between competitive pressure and time pressure. This experimental design was not only creative, but also rigorous, with relevant controls, task-consistency mechanisms and a whole range of variables to measure. The experiments replicated previous findings that under time pressure on math tasks men attained higher scores and had a higher propensity to select into tournaments.

The innovative experimental design also yielded important new insights. On verbal tasks under time pressure, women performed as well as men and had a similar propensity to enter competitions. In a verbal competition under time pressure, women did slightly better than men. Things really took off once the time pressure was lowered – women outperformed men on the verbal tasks under competition. On the math task with low time pressure, women and men performed similarly both with and without competition. Interestingly, giving more time for the math task doubled the number of women who elected to compete. So it’s not the pressure of the competition or inherent math abilities that were hurting the performance of women in earlier experiments – it was time!

Why did time help women so much more than the men? Making the competition about total points, not speed, allowed for a measurement of the quality dimension. A look at the kinds of words women were finding when given the time reveals an emphasis on quality – they made longer words and made fewer mistakes. The men, on the other hand, went for quantity of words and in the process lost points for misspellings and typos. Perhaps more women participated in the math tournament when they had more time, because it allowed them to check their calculations more thoroughly.

Professor Shruchkov was careful with drawing policy implications out of experimental results, but she suggested that take-home exams in math and science might help more girls excel in those subjects early on, which could get more of them interested in pursuing those careers. Personally, I am tempted to use the results to ask for a final paper extension right now! I wonder what Shruchkov tells her students when they try to do that. 

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.