Why Do Women Favor In-group Competition? Evidence From an Incentive Compatible Choice Experiment

This paper identifies a woman's self-confidence to boost her competition willingness independently from the gender-mix of the competitor's group. We conduct an incentive compatible online choice experiment with 883 non-standard subjects, 442 of them female, with competition-free and competition-involving choice sets that ruled inter alia the gender-related composition of the competitors group. Our framed field experimental setting demonstrates that indeed the participating women are more eager to engage in same-gender than in mixed-gender competition. However, if a woman is revealed to be self-confident, she is more engaged in competition even against a mixed-gender group with gender-differences in competition disappearing. Our interpretation is twofold: On the one hand, we confirm a woman's competition ability, whereas on the other, we must admit that this is driven by the strength of her self-concept.