Gender differences

Project descriptions, links to papers and presentation slides

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Men stay longer in high-prize work tournaments than women.

Workplace competition extends work time

Elite careers are typically male dominated and entail workplace competition and long work hours. We test the underlying mechanisms for why this gender inequality exists using field experiments where workers determine work duration. Both men and women work longer when a tournament prize is added to the pay of the highest performing worker in their group. However, despite our design eliminating outside obligations, men stay significantly longer than women in the high-prize tournament treatment. Men are also more likely than women to choose tournament-based overtime compensation, over a wage rate, for large prizes. This reveals direct and indirect mechanisms through which high-stakes workplace competition drives gender inequality. Directly, men are more likely to enter and win. Indirectly, tournaments raise work hours, and women face greater time constraints.

Link to paper

Miller, Amalia, Ragan Petrie and Carmit Segal, “Effects of Workplace Competition on Work Time and Gender Inequality,” conditionally accepted, ILR Review

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Women make larger bets when surrounded by men.

Women take more risks with men in the room

Social context effects decision-making under uncertainty: the gender composition of those in the room when making individual risky decisions significantly alters choices even when the actions or presence of others are not payoff relevant. Women become more risk taking as the proportion of men in the room increases, but the behavior of men is unaffected by who is present. We conjecture this is driven by women being aware of the social context and imitating the expected behavior of others. Our results imply that the environment in which individual decisions are made can change expressed preferences and that aggregate behavior may be context dependent.
Link to paper

Castillo, Marco, Gregory Leo and Ragan Petrie, 2020, “Room Composition Effects on Risk Taking by Gender,” Experimental Economics, 23(3), 895-911.

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Women are as competitive as men if the prize for winning is large enough

Competition gender gap eliminated for large prizes

Gender differences in competitiveness have been suggested as an explanation for the observed dearth of women in highly-ranked positions within firms. We ask whether a price mechanism could be used to achieve gender balance in a winner-take-all tournament environment. If the rewards to competition are
sufficiently large, women are willing to compete at the same rate as men and will win as many competitions as men. This means that firms that desire a gender balanced workforce could achieve
it.

Link to paper

Petrie, Ragan and Carmit Segal, “Gender Differences in Competitiveness: The Role of Prizes,” Working Paper

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Men are more likely to be rejected in a negotiation for a taxi ride than women

Gender differences in field bargaining outcomes

We examine gender differences in bargaining outcomes in a highly competitive and frequently used market: the taxi market in Lima, Peru. Our bargaining script secures that only the seller can change prices and terminate negotiations, thus we are able to examine differences in the seller’s entire path of negotiation and in the reservation price at which they are willing to trade. We find that male and female passengers who use the same bargaining
script are not treated equally. Men face higher initial prices, final prices, and rejection rates. Male drivers are more reluctant to give-­in to demanding negotiations by male passengers, and male passengers are perceived as having high valuations. In this highly competitive market with experienced traders, we do not find evidence of taste-­based discrimination. The differential observed is however consistent with statistical discrimination

Link to paper

Castillo, Marco, Ragan Petrie, Maximo Torero and Lise Vesterlund, 2013, “Gender Differences in Bargaining Outcomes: A Field Experiment on Discrimination,” Journal of Public Economics, 99, 35-48

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