Redeeming Gender Studies

• Post by: Bryce J. Christensen
• January 21, 2010

The myth of the glass ceiling continues to be debunked. Challenging the presumption that women are underrepresented in high-status jobs because of discrimination, economists at Stanford University and the University of Pittsburgh offer empirical evidence for the more plausible explanation that the two sexes respond differently to competitive environments. Muriel Niederle and Lise Versterlund conducted an experiment at the Pittsburgh Experimental Economics Laboratory, where 40 men and 40 women were divided into 20 groups (each containing two men and two women seated in rows), to investigate gender differences in the preferences for competition and how those differences, if any, account for economic outcomes. They asked participants to take three simple, five-minute math tests, one of which would be chosen as the basis for compensation at the end of the experiment. If the first test were chosen, participants would be paid 50 cents for each correct answer; if the second were chosen, only the individual in each group with the most correct answers would be paid $2 for every correct answer, while the others would receive nothing. Before taking the third test, participants were asked to select the payment scheme (piece-rate or tournament) under which they would prefer to perform. While gender differences were nonexistent in all three test performances, twice as many men (73 percent) as women (35 percent) selected the tournament scheme in Test 3, a “robust” difference that remained when the researchers compared the choices of men and women of equal performance ranges. In fact, they also discovered that low-ability men chose to enter the tournament “too often” while high-ability women entered it “too rarely.” To explain the gap, the researchers asked participants to guess how their performance in Test 2 ranked relative to the others in their group; participants would be paid $1 if their guess were correct. The men were “substantially more” overconfid