At a recent presentation at Wharton, attendees watched as a New Yorker cartoon flashed on the screen showing a group of women in what looked suspiciously like a faculty club dining room. The caption read: “I hear we’re all getting Valentines from Lawrence Summers.” The reference, of course, was to the Harvard University president’s famous remark in January that the lack of women in science and engineering might be caused in part by gender differences in aptitude.
Stanford University economist and guest presenter Muriel Niederle, who clearly disagreed with Summers’ sentiment, used the cartoon to highlight some of her research into other possible factors behind the scarcity of women in top engineering and science positions. Niederle, the guest speaker at a Decision Processes Seminar, focused in particular on a paper she co-authored with University of Pittsburgh economist Lise Vesterlund titled, “Do Women Shy Away from Competition? Do Men Compete Too Much?”
Her answer, at least to the first question, was a firm “Yes.” The research indicated that even at a task that women clearly perform as well as men, they are less likely to choose a competitive setting, more likely to underrate their performance when they have to guess at it, and perhaps even more likely to shy away from receiving feedback. “If women shy away from competition and men compete too much,” the authors wrote, “this … decreases the chance of women succeeding in competition for promotions and more lucrative jobs.”
Their conclusions were based on a rigidly controlled experiment in which male and female subjects indicated a willingness, or lack of willingness, to have their work rated in a competitive -- in this case a tournament involving the solution of simple math problems. Men and women performed the tasks about equally well, she and Vesterlund found, but women at all ability levels were less likely to choose a tournament setting.
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