Girls Will Be Boys: Gender, Beliefs and Selection in the Field
Abstract: Growing evidence from, mostly, laboratory supports the view that women, compared to men, have a greater dislike for competitive environments and sometimes underperform in such settings. This literature points at differences in attitudes towards risk, competition and confidence as possible explanations. We try to understand this more by going to the field. We study store managers who work for a firm with a highly competitive, high powered incentive scheme, with public circulation of weekly league tables. We combine historical data from the firm with a series of lab-in-the-field experiments with the managers. In contrast with existing evidence, we find that women are not put off by the highly competitive nature of the firm’s incentive scheme. Indeed, 60% of the managers are women. Furthermore, in historical data, we find no differences in performance of men and women or in retention. There are also no gender differences in job satisfaction, confidence or risk-aversion. These results show that many women can be attracted to competitive jobs and, once there, perform similarly to men, and have similar attitudes. One obvious explanation is that certain types of women self-select themselves into our firm. We show, however, that this cannot be the full story. We find a striking contrast between on-the-job results and behaviour of the same female managers in the lab, where we engaged them in a maths task (Niederle and Versterlund (2007) design). We find that female managers displayed significantly less confidence and more dislike of competition compared to men in the laboratory task, even though they performed on par with men in this task. Taken together our findings show that competitive incentive schemes in the workplace do not necessarily lead to gender differences in behaviour and attitudes. Further, self-selection is not the full story. The nature of the task matters: while gender differences may be absent in one domain, and persist in others.
