Communications of the ACM
Gender and Competition: What Companies Need to Know
Credit: problemfinding.labanca.net
Pressure to not compete against men, rather than an innate preference for cooperation over competition, may keep women from earning what they're worth in the workplace, according to preliminary findings by three Harvard researchers. What they found in their early research on cooperation and competition is that women's and men's workplace performance may be strongly linked to the gender of the person they are competing against. Drawing on previous studies of gender gaps and inequality in the workplace, they analyze the competitiveness of women in particular work environments or groups. This research could provide insights as to why women are paid less, have trouble being promoted in certain work environments, and hold a small percentage of top corporate management positions.
The goal was to answer questions on gender, competition, and cooperation that have not been addressed in previous research, such as whether men and women react differently to diverse sorts of pay schemes. To answer these questions, they used cooperative and competitive scenarios in which participants performed both a verbal and a math test at Harvard Business School's Computer Lab for Experimental Research. Interestingly, the researchers didn't find a significant difference in performance between the cooperative and the competitive payment schemes for either men or women. There's a strongly held assumption that men are competitive and women aren't, and these results show otherwise. In addition, past studies mostly utilized tasks that would stereotypically advantage men, such as math or maze tasks. The Harvard research team built on that research by asking participants to complete tasks that were stereotypically female as well.
How do the researchers explain the differences between past and present results? In previous studies, participants were offered a higher pay rate per correct answer in the competitive scenario, so it's possible that men respond more to higher pay rates than do women. Societal pressures might also hold women back from responding to higher pay as aggressively as men do. Furthermore, previous studies compared behavior under an interdependent, competitive scheme with an independent, piece-rate scheme. Perhaps in previous studies men were responding to the interdependence built into competitive situations and the stereotypically male tasks utilized in these studies, rather than to competitive pressures per se. The results suggest that gender effects around competition are contextual and that the results depend on the sorts of tasks men and women are asked to complete and the gender of those with whom they are interacting.
From Harvard Business School
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