The Emergence of Male Leadership in Competitive Environments

By Ernesto Reuben, Pedro Rey-Biel, Paola Sapienza, Luigi Zingales. Social Science Research Network, 2012

162 citations recorded by the source corpus.

a b s t r a c t We present evidence from an experiment in which groups select a leader to compete against the leaders of other groups in a real-effort task that they have all performed in the past. We find that women are selected much less often as leaders than is suggested by their individual past performance. We study three potential explanations for the underrepresentation of women, namely, gender differences in overconfidence concerning past performance, in the willingness to exaggerate past performance to the group, and in the reaction to monetary incentives. We find that men's overconfidence is the driving force behind the observed prevalence of male representation.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management Science and Operations Research, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/12061e89ed9d140f3fb69ef12c56e01ea12ef9ff

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Luigi Zingales
2. Paola Sapienza
3. Albert Saiz
4. Ernesto Reuben
5. Thorsten Beck
6. Atif R. Mian
7. Amir Sufi
8. Raghuram G. Rajan

In Management Science and Operations Research

1. Ernesto Reuben
2. Paola Sapienza
3. Luigi Zingales

In Safety Research

1. Paola Sapienza
2. Luigi Zingales
3. Pablo Casas-Arce
4. Albert Saiz
5. Ernesto Reuben

Citations in the corpus

• Women and Power: Unpopular, Unwilling, or Held Back? (2015, background): “They could also be explained by the endogenous emergence of rent-seeking male coalitions within the parties ðReuben et al. 2010Þ. Alternatively, the results could indicate that women are effective at generating political ideas and enticing voters but are less adept at elbowing out internal party…”
• How stereotypes impair women’s careers in science (2014, background): “This behavior is consistent with existing research reporting that women underestimate their performance and show more modesty than men in self-promotion (15, 16).”