The Hindu Business Line : Do women shy away from competition?

ALL the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players, the Bard said in As you like it. He didn't say that the two play differently, but that's a fact you'd agree to, despite all that's heatedly said about gender equality.

For instance, "Only 2.5 per cent of the five highest paid executives in a large data set of the US firms are women; in academia, women are not well represented in math, science and engineering, and the difference increases with increases in academic rank; plus, there also appears to be a leakage of women at the career ladder in economics," as one reads in a recent paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research (www.nber.org) titled `Do Women Shy Away From Competition? Do Men Compete Too Much?' by Muriel Niederle and Lise Vesterlund.

Umpteen times we've heard in debates that the differences arise from women's preferences of domestic responsibilities, and workplace discrimination between women and men with equal abilities. So, the authors, both from the department of economics, of Stanford University and the University of Pittsburgh respectively, designed a lab experiment to study the evergreen argument about the sexes.

Let us level the playing field and eliminate discrimination or differences in workloads and ability, say the authors, before exploring "the possibility that differences will arise because women and men differ in their preference for competitive environments." The rationale is that if women shy away from competition and men compete too much, this not only reduces the number of women who enter tournaments, but also those who win tournaments, notes the paper.

Task given to men and women volunteers who participated in the experiment was to add up sets of five two-digit numbers (such as 21, 35, 48, 29 and 83) for five minutes, without using calculators. Participants first performed the task under piece-rate compensation of 50 cents per correct answer. And then, they get paid under tournament conditions, where "the participant who solves the largest number of correct problems in the group receives $2 per correct answer, while the other participants receive no payment," as Niederle and Vesterlund explain their experimental design.

After having gone through both compensation forms, participants exercise their choice of compensation method, that is, piece rate or tournament, for the next task. "Each participant received a $5 show-up fee, and an additional $7 for completing the experiment," informs the paper, and I wish they outsourced the next experiment to us!

Okay, what are the findings? For answer, I shuffle all those pages of graphs, grids, data and tables to `conclusion'. But, first, let me caution the activists to take a deep breath. Because twice as many men as women entered the tournament, and even when women performed as well as men in a competitive environment, they opted out of tournaments, while men opted in! "Even when women and men are equally successful in the competitive environment, if given a choice, high-performing women will not enter the competition," but low-performing men will enter too much. "Since the costs of under-entry are larger than those of over-entry, women have lower earnings than men," postulate the two economists.

What is significant in the research is that despite eliminating factors that impinge on the common explanations - such as that women avoid competition more than men because they are more risk averse, dislike receiving information on relative performance, and are less optimistic about their relative performance and the precision of such beliefs - the authors find "large gender differences in the propensity to choose competitive environments".

Which is a cause for concern, they'd note. "We feel that the effects we discover in the lab are sufficiently strong to call for a greater attention of standard economics to explanations of gender differences that so far have mostly been left in the hands of psychologists and sociologists," is how the paper signs off glumly.

"Most women set out to try to change a man, and when they have changed him they do not like him," said Marlene Dietrich. One may say the same of those who set out to change women to become as competitive as men; but that can spark off a new debate!

SayCheek@TheHindu.co.in

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