The conventional wisdom holds that men and women have different abilities when it comes to competition (a view that’s certainly being challenged in the current Democratic primary). Labels like “lacking the killer instinct,” “peacemaker,” and “avoiding confrontation” are commonly assigned to women in competitive environments, while the supposed male knack for thriving in competition is cited as a reason for the persistent wage gap between the sexes.
But is an enhanced or decreased competitive drive a result of biology, or simply a culturally instilled trait? University of Chicago professors Uri Gneezy and John List and Columbia professor Kenneth Leonard performed a controlled experiment to test this question, and published their results in the new working paper, “Gender Differences in Competition: Evidence From a Matrilineal and a Patriarchal Society.”
Their method consisted of studying two distinct social groups: the Maasai in Tanzania, a “textbook example of a patriarchal society” in which women and children are considered “property,” and the Khasi in India, who are matrilineal, meaning female-dominated through inheritance laws, household authority, and social structures — though still distinct from “matriarchal,” since, as the authors point out, “the sociological literature is almost unanimous in the conclusion that truly matriarchal societies no longer exist.”
Gneezy, List, and Leonard tested the competitive drives of 155 subjects, male and female, by gathering groups of men and women from both tribes, offering them money in exchange for participation in an experiment, separating them into individual rooms, and then giving them tasks like tossing a tennis ball into a bucket 10 times. Each subject was told that he or she was competing against an unnamed rival in another room, and was given a choice of payment options: receive either a) “X per successful shot, regardless of the performance of the participant from the other group with whom they were randomly matched;” or b) “3X per successful shot if they outperformed the other participant.” Their results are summarized as follows:
Our experimental results reveal interesting differences in competitiveness: in the patriarchal society women are less competitive than men, a result consistent with student data drawn from Western cultures. Yet, this result reverses in the matrilineal society, where we find that women are more competitive than men. Perhaps surprisingly, Khasi women are even slightly more competitive than Maasai men, but this difference is not statistically significant at conventional levels under any of our formal statistical tests.
While plenty of studies have contrasted the competitive drives of men and women, few, if any, have isolated subjects who’ve spent their lives blissfully free of Western (and Eastern, for that matter) cultural biases about gender. Now if we could only test how the Khasi women fare in corporate law firms…
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From a woman’s perspective, this is intriguing yet noy unexpected. In a patriarchal society women are turned off by the very word competition, since it puts them at psychological war or separation from the other individual. women by nature are holistic, caring and inclusive.
In a matrilineal culture, competition is just personal excellence, you are competing with yourself, wanting to do your best, without focusing on what other person is doing. I find this research interesting…
Peace
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Like just about every study of “environment versus nature”, I imagine that the authors of this work ignore this possibility: if the Maasai and Khasi consist of a fairly homogenous gene pool and have been patriarchal or matriarchal for a long enough period, perhaps genetic proclivities towards competitiveness have been artificially depressed (or heightened, as the case may be).
Was this possibility addressed? While the mating advantages for “competitive” women amongst the Khasi appear to be common-sensical, just how pernicious are the disadvantages suffered by “competitive” women among the Maasai?
My ex and I were hyper-competitive… I think I can fairly say that both of us are better off for it, and probably better off without each other. However, when she called and told be she was engaged, I was pissed. Not because I wanted her back… because that means she won the ‘convinced some poor soul to marry me’ competition. Its okay though, I’m confident I’ll win ‘driving a Porsche’ and ‘least dollars spent on therapy for my kids.’
Although I have not read the entire study, it looks to me like they were testing something completely different than “competitiveness” in this study. As hinted at by Darshanand, they are testing either the potential to take risk or gamble, possibly due to the provider-type role. Mind you, that’s interesting in and of itself. But to test competitiveness, I think a face to face competition with NO PAYOFF will tell a better result. I.e., the victor wins so-called “bragging rights” and the smugness of superiority, not 3X some value.
I find myself to be extremely competitive (moreso than i would like) when playing games or sports, but I am not a gambler and thus, in this scenario, I would take the easy money. Especially without having any idea who you are competing against. Is it a 90-yo senile person or basketball pro or Joe/Jane Shmoe?
Makes intuitive sense: If I’m offered a chance to play a game that I know is fundamentally biased against me, I will either opt out entirely, or, if that’s not an option, do only the minimum required. If, however, I’m invited into a game that is biased in my favor, I’ll kick a** and take names. My effort will be invested where it can reap the highest return.
Seems easily extensible beyond the context of gender.
See also Niederle and Vesterlund’s paper, “Do Women Shy Away From Competition? Do Men Compete Too Much?”
From the abstract: “Although there are no gender differences in performance under either compensation, there is a substantial gender difference when participants subsequently choose the scheme they want to apply to their next performance. Twice as many men as women choose the tournament over the piece rate. This gender gap in tournament entry is not explained by performance either before or after the entry decision.”
http://www.pitt.edu/~vester/qje.pdf
http://www.nber.org/papers/w11474
Thanks for posting this paper. This is really great stuff, and I rarely think that about boring economics. If this is economics where do I sign up?
Women compete for men too, you know. And all this ‘througout human history’ is ignoring what this paper was focusing on: that in different human cultures things are really different. There is no “througout human history” because some of my ancestors would have come from really different cultures, some of which were violent, some of them were peacefull, some were egalitarian, others were ranked. There are other ways to organize society other than how we do it, thats why you can’t disprove this study by “visiting a pre-school”.