Gender, Competitiveness, and Socialization at a Young Age: Evidence From a Matrilineal and a Patriarchal Society

By Steffen Andersen, Seda Ertac, Uri Gneezy, John A. List, Sandra Maximiano. Review of Economics and Statistics, 2013

289 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Recent literature presents evidence that men are more competitively inclined than women. Since top-level careers usually require competitiveness, competitiveness differences provide an explanation for gender gaps in wages and differences in occupational choice. A natural question is whether women are born less competitive or whether they become so through the process of socialization. To pinpoint when in the socialization process the difference arises, we compare the competitiveness of children in matrilineal and patriarchal societies. We find that while there is no difference at any age in the matrilineal society, girls become less competitive around puberty in the patriarchal society.

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c3c989caef60d07a58322d7799cb5949f7ee376a

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Citations in the corpus

Economic behavior of children and adolescents – A first survey of experimental economics results (2019, background): “Most studies with children and adolescents document a strong gender gap in the willingness to compete (Booth and Nolen, 2012a; Andersen et al., 2013; Buser et al., 2014; Dreber et al., 2014; Sutter and Glätzle-Rützler, 2015; Almås et al., 2016; Sutter et al., 2016).”
Taste for Competition and the Gender Gap Among Young Business Professionals (2015, background): “(2012), and Niederle, Segal, and Vesterlund (2013), in addition to experiments that vary the design in important ways like Gneezy, Leonard, and List (2009), Dohmen and Falk (2011), Booth and Nolen (2012), Andersen et al. (2013), and Gupta, Poulsen, and Villeval (2013).”
Gender and Competition (2011, background): “…in which women, conditional on performance, enter tournaments less than men (e.g., Gupta et al. 2011, Booth & Nolen 2009, Gneezy et al. 2009, Kamas & Preston 2009, Vandegrift & Yavas 2009, Andersen et al. 2010, Ertac & Szentes 2010, Herreiner & Pannell 2010, Dohmen & Falk 2011, Shurchkov 2011).”
The Gender Gap in Self-Promotion (2019, background): “(24)For additional work on how gender gaps vary by culture, see Andersen et al. (2013) and Andersen et al. (2018). For work on the importance of gender norms and identity, see Akerlof and Kranton (2000), Bertrand (2011), and Bertrand, Kamenica and Pan (2015). (25)While not on self-evaluations, prior”
Gender and competition in adolescence: task matters (2013, background): “Exploring both children and adolescents in India, Andersen et al. (2013) find no gender difference at any age in a matrilineal society, whereas girls become less competitive than boys during puberty in a patriarchal society.”