Women Do Like to Compete — Against Themselves

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/opinion/sunday/women-do-like-to-compete-against-themselves.html

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About 10 years ago, when we were both Ph.D. students at Harvard, we were invited to participate in an unofficial and largely secret wrestling tournament organized by a fellow student. The idea was to showcase a handful of competitive wrestling matches between graduate students in different departments to an invitation-only audience. Space and gym mats were rented, a referee and a master of ceremonies were appointed, and monetary bets were placed on individual matches. Each wrestler had his or her own costume, entrance song and fan base. Alcohol flowed freely among the spectators.

Neither of us remembers why we agreed to participate — we had never wrestled anyone before — but somehow we ended up there that night, and because of our similar height and weight we were paired to fight each other. One of us wore a sparkly gold leotard, and the other made her entrance to the “Rocky” theme song.

We were only acquaintances back then, and would have never guessed that all these years later, we would be professors collaborating on research about competitiveness in women. A recent study of ours, which will be published in May in the Papers and Proceedings issue of the American Economic Review, found that there are certain situations in which women can be just as competitive as men. This finding, we hope, will help alter some longstanding assumptions about women in the workplace.

For all the remarkable progress that has been made in increasing gender equality, women still earn significantly less money than men and remain markedly underrepresented in high-status, powerful positions. One of the reasons offered by economists and psychologists for why these disparities still exist is a gender difference in the willingness to compete.

Years of research suggest that men are more competitive than women. Imagine there is a task you must complete — a series of math problems, for instance — and you have to choose to be paid for your performance in one of two ways. One option is to be compensated for each individual math problem you solve (say, $1 per problem). The other option is that you enter a tournament in which you compete against another person; only the person who solves the most problems receives payment for the number of problems solved — but it’s double payment ($2 per problem). Even when men and women perform similarly on the task, studies show, women are less likely to choose to enter the tournament.

This sort of finding has been replicated in children and in people across a diverse range of societies. One of us works with one of the last remaining populations of hunter-gatherers on the planet — the Hadza people of Tanzania — and even in their society, which departs greatly from ours in many ways, men tend to be more competitive than women. These results suggest that this sex difference may be a universal feature of our psychology and was, perhaps, even present in our early human ancestors.

Our research is concerned with understanding why women shy away from competition, as this may lead to potential solutions for increasing gender equality in the workplace. In our recent study, for which we recruited about 1,200 men and women and which was conducted with a graduate student, Elif Demiral of George Mason University, we wanted to see if women were just as competitive as men when choosing to compete against their own past performance. This is akin to shaving time off your last five-mile run or beating your last score in a video game.

One experiment involved simple arithmetic questions for which participants could earn money for each problem they correctly solved. There were three rounds of play. Participants were assigned to one of two experimental conditions: “self” or “other.” In the first round, all participants were paid $1 for every math problem they solved. In Round 2, the participants in the “self” condition attempted to beat their performances from Round 1. If successful, they earned $2 for every problem solved; if unsuccessful, they earned nothing.

For the “other” condition, participants were randomly assigned to an opponent. If they solved more problems than their opponents did, they received $2 for every problem they correctly solved. If they did not beat their opponent’s score, they received nothing.

It was Round 3 that we were most interested in. In this round, participants could choose whether to be paid the lower amount for each correct answer (as in Round 1) or to compete for high earnings (as in Round 2). In the “other” condition, in which participants who chose to compete did so against another person, we saw the usual pattern: Men were significantly more willing to compete than women and, as a result, walked away with more money. In the “self” condition, however, women were just as likely as men to choose to compete, to try to beat their own previous score.

Why is it that women do not choose to compete against others, but are eager to compete when the opponent is themselves? The answer is largely confidence. When competing against others, we find, women are less sure about whether they can actually win the competition — even when their ability tells us that they are very likely to do so. In the case of self-competition there is no such gender difference in confidence.

Competitions are a great motivational tool for increasing performance. This is one of the main reasons institutions often encourage competitive pressure. Our study also examined whether people improved their performance in the arithmetic task more between the first two rounds when Round 2 involved a competition against others versus self. It turns out that men and women who competed against themselves improved their score just as much as those who competed against another person. Thus our study suggests that competition against yourself is equally effective in improving performance.

Creating opportunities for self-competition in the workplace, then, is one way to make women equally competitive as men. We recommend that when possible, bosses steer competitive pressure to focus on self-improvement and mastery rather than competitions among colleagues. In addition, we suggest that bosses consider providing feedback to employees on their relative performance: If women know how well they are doing compared with their peers, they may be better equipped to make informed decisions about whether or not to compete against others. Above all, we encourage women to be aware of the female propensity to shy away from competitions. Take time to think about what is actually stopping you from competing. Is the competition really so scary?

Fostering self-competition is not the only way to make women as competitive as men. Previous research has also shown that women are more willing to compete against other women than to compete against men. The reason may be that female opponents have a positive impact on women’s confidence in their ability to perform and win. Indeed, this may be one reason the two of us agreed to participate in the wrestling match against each other.

The night of the tournament, the referee preemptively added a couple of extra rules to our “girl” match: no hair pulling and no tickling. The audience roared with laughter.

It turns out that neither one of us was ready to submit to her opponent. Our match went for three grueling rounds, the longest that night, leaving us both panting for air, exhausted but proud of ourselves for putting up a good fight. We will not reveal who won, but we are happy to report that neither of us resorted to tickling.