@article{0de295afd51541ac80aadcc2c6d6144f,
title = "Option to cooperate increases women's competitiveness and closes the gender gap",
abstract = "We advance the hypothesis that women are as competitive as men once the incentive for winning includes factors that matter to women. Allowing winners an opportunity to share some of their winnings with the low performers has gendered consequences for competitive behavior. We ground our work in an evolutionary framework in which winning competitions brings asymmetric benefits and costs to men and women. In the new environment, the potential to share some of the rewards from competition with others may afford women the benefit of reaping competitive gains without incurring some of its potential costs. An experiment (N = 438 in an online convenience sample of U.S. adults) supports our hypothesis: a 26% gender gap in performance vanishes once a sharing option is included to an otherwise identical winner-take-all incentive scheme. Besides providing a novel experiment that challenges the paradigm that women are not as motivated to compete as men, our work proposes some suggestions for policy: including socially-oriented rewards to contracts may offer a novel tool to close the persistent labor market gender gap.",
keywords = "Competition, Dictator game, Gender differences, Social reward, Tournament",
author = "Alessandra Cassar and Rigdon, {Mary L.}",
note = "Funding Information: The authors would like to thank Andras Molnar for excellent computer programming and Lisa Tsinis, Yongqi Chen, and Ruoxian Zhang for research assistance with figures. We also thank the Editor, two anonymous referees, Jaime Krems, Leda Cosmides, Thony Gillies, Charlie Holt, Sarah Hrdy, Prachi Jain, Travis Lybbert, Rose McDermott, Nathan Nunn, Chris von Rueden, and John Tooby for invaluable comments and the participants at Chapman University, UC Davis, the University of Arizona, the Culture, Cognition and Evolution Lab at Harvard University, Center for Evolutionary Psychology at UCSB, the 2018 Culture Evolution Society Conference, the 2019 North American meeting of the Economic Science Association, the 2020 Economic Science Association Global Online Around-the-Clock Meetings, and the 2021 Australian Gender Economics Workshop. Cassar thanks the University of San Francisco for covering the costs of the experimental sessions and Rigdon thanks the Research Council at Rutgers University for funds to travel to present the research at a conference. This work has been supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (SES#1919535). Funding Information: The authors would like to thank Andras Molnar for excellent computer programming and Lisa Tsinis, Yongqi Chen, and Ruoxian Zhang for research assistance with figures. We also thank the Editor, two anonymous referees, Jaime Krems, Leda Cosmides, Thony Gillies, Charlie Holt, Sarah Hrdy, Prachi Jain, Travis Lybbert, Rose McDermott, Nathan Nunn, Chris von Rueden, and John Tooby for invaluable comments and the participants at Chapman University, UC Davis, the University of Arizona, the Culture, Cognition and Evolution Lab at Harvard University, Center for Evolutionary Psychology at UCSB, the 2018 Culture Evolution Society Conference, the 2019 North American meeting of the Economic Science Association, the 2020 Economic Science Association Global Online Around-the-Clock Meetings, and the 2021 Australian Gender Economics Workshop. Cassar thanks the University of San Francisco for covering the costs of the experimental sessions and Rigdon thanks the Research Council at Rutgers University for funds to travel to present the research at a conference. This work has been supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (SES#1919535). Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2021 Elsevier Inc.",
year = "2021",
month = nov,
doi = "10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2021.06.001",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "42",
pages = "556--572",
journal = "Evolution and Human Behavior",
issn = "1090-5138",
publisher = "Elsevier Inc.",
number = "6",
}