Article: why are there still so few women at the top?

a gender difference in competitiveness ?

In the last decades the position of women has become more and more equal to men. However, at the top, men still dominate. Betrand and Hallock found in 2001 that only 2.5 percent of the top positions are held by women. Reseachers have tried to explain this by discrimination (demand side explanation)  or difference in preferences, i.e. the role of the women in the family etc. (supply side explanation). However in recent years a third explanation is suggested, one that is not often heard in the public debate. Namely, the finding that men and women differ in their competitiveness.

To reach the top workers have to compete (multiple times) with one another for higher positions in the company. If women, for some reason, do not perform well if they have to compete, it will hurt their chance to advance positions.   

men are better at solving mazes?

A series of experiments seem to indicate that women indeed perform worse when having to compete. One of the first to find this result are Gneezy, Niederle and Rustichini in their paper performance in competitive environments: Gender Differences” (2003). An earlier draft of the paper from 2001 can be found for free here.

Gneez et al. performed a simple lab study. Students needed to solve as many mazes as they could in a 15 min time span. The mazes they used can be found here, level 2 was used in the experiment. In the first round the students got paid per maze solved, hence there was no competition. In the second round only the person who solved the most mazes would get paid. This second round had both single sex as mixed gender competitions.

In the first round (without competition) males solved 11.23 mazes and females solved 9.73 mazes. The differences was not significantly different from one another. In the second round the following results were found:

• In sessions with only men, the average of mazes solved was 14.3
• In sessions with only female, the average of mazes solved was 12.6
• In sessions with both genders, males solved 15 mazes while females solved 10.8 mazes on average.

This implicates that:

• Men in comparison with a non-competitive environment perform significantly better, in every session.
• Women do not perform better in comparison with the non-competitive environment when competing against men.
• Women do compete better  in comparison with the non-competitive environment when competing against females, but still perform significantly worse than men.

Although the different papers have found different results for effect of the gender of the opponent, for example one paper found the result that men started to perform worse when competing against females, the results that men compete better than women in a competitive environment seems robust.

women at the top..

Niederle and Versterlund in their paper “Do women shy away from competition? Do men compete to much?(2007) added an interesting finding (find the paper here). In their experiment the subjects got to choose whether they wanted to get paid on a piece-rate scheme or in a tournament setting. While there was no difference between women and men in performance, 73% of the men chose for the tournament setting, for females this was only 35% percent. So it seems that men, besides performing better in a competitive environment, are also more eager to compete.

These papers seems to indicate that if we want more women at the top we need to create environments in which women are willing to compete, or find some way to get women at the top without them having to compete (as much). How this needs to be done remains to be seen. Do you have a good idea? Leave a comment!