Choosing to Compete: How Different are Girls and Boys?

By Alison L. Booth, Patrick J. Nolen. Social Science Research Network, 2012

422 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Using a controlled experiment, we examine the role of nurture in explaining the stylized fact that women shy away from competition. Our subjects (students just under 15 years of age) attend publicly-funded single-sex and coeducational schools. We find robust differences between the competitive choices of girls from single-sex and coed schools. Moreover, girls from single-sex schools behave more like boys even when randomly assigned to mixed-sex experimental groups. Thus it is untrue that the average female avoids competitive behaviour more than the average male. This suggests that observed gender differences might reflect social learning rather than inherent gender traits.

Subfields: Demography, Education, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9e0de8c4d0fc7192a21a1174611644d0b808947a

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Citations in the corpus

Gender Differences and Dynamics in Competition: The Role of Luck (2012, positive): “Booth and Nolen (2009)’s and Gneezy et al. (2009)’s results suggest that culture and upbringing may have some influence, while those of Buser (2009) and Wozniak et al. (2010) indicate that female sex hormones play a mediating role.”
Gender and the Labor Market: What Have We Learned from Field and Lab Experiments? (2014, background): “Bowles et al. (2007) study gender differences in negotiation in the presence of an evaluator, who can be male or female. An important result in their study is that women are less likely to start a negotiation in the presence of a male evaluator, andwomen who initiate negotiations receive systematica”
Academic Performance and Single-Sex Schooling: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Switzerland (2015, neutral): “In the light of these considerations, making use of a natural experiment, as we do in our study, may well offer the most convincing identification strategy.”
Noncognitive Skills, Occupational Attainment, and Relative Wages (2009, positive): “Recent experimental evidence, for example, suggests that often-observed gender differences in risk-taking or competitive behaviour depend on the specific social context (Booth and Nolan, 2009a,b).”
Behavioral Economics of Education (2015, background): “For example, girls from single sex schools are more eager to ngage in competition than girls from co-educational schools (Booth and Nolen, 2012).”
How Costly Is Diversity? Affirmative Action in Light of Gender Differences in Competitiveness (2013, neutral): “It may be that girls do not dislike competition per se, but rather that they dislike competing against boys, i.e., girls in all-girl schools may be more competitive (e.g., Harwarth et al. 1997, Booth and Nolen 2012).”
Gender, Single-Sex Schooling and Maths Achievement (2012, background): “Huguet and Régner (2007) find that this effect particularly pronounced when girls are led to believe at a task measures maths ability rather than other ilities.5 Booth and Nolen (2012) examine the impact of school vironment on attitudes to competition.”