Choosing To Compete: How Di¤erent Are Girls and Boys?

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 …nd robust di¤erences 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 di¤erences might re‡ect social learning rather than inherent gender traits. Keywords: tournament, piece-rate, gender, experiment, competitive behaviour JEL Classi…cation: C91, C92, J16, J33