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Andy’s Quick Hits (115): Women Can Be Just as Competitive as Men — Under Certain Conditions
So are women not as competitive as men?
We do tend to think of men as being the competitive sex. But it gets hard to quantify and disentangle multiple confounding factors. For example, more men than women participate in competitive sports but how much is culturally based we don’t know.
What about in the business world?
Here again we tend to view men as being more competitive. This is also one reason cited for the gender pay gap. This is why Alessandra Cassar and Mary Rigdon of the University of Arizona decided to investigate this.
And what did they find?
They found that men are in general more competitive than women. Unless some conditions were changed.
Now I’m intrigued. What conditions?
They cleverly set up some conditions of performance with and without competition.
In situation one participants were paid for completing tasks (matching numbers in tables — they were given $2 for each successfully completed table).
Then participants were split into two competitive groups. In group one rewards, $4, was only give to the two top performing people. In group two the reward of $4 was also given…
