Title: How Competitive are Professional Women? A Tale of Identity Conflict.

Speaker： Dr. Fei Song, Associate Professor of HRM/OB，Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University.

Time: 10：00 -- 11：30 am. 17th Jun

Location: Room 216, Guanghua New Building

BIO

Abstract

Despite continuous improvements over the last few decades, relative to men, women are still earning less in the workforce, occupying fewer seats in the boardrooms, and are under-represented in many high-profile jobs and across many professions. This gap is particularly pronounced between married men and married women. Extensive research has been conducted in various social sciences to study this phenomenon, and, more importantly, to determine whether it is desirable, and if so how to narrow and ultimately close this gender gap.

Our study continues this line of research, focusing specifically on gender differences in competitive environments. Recent literature (e.g., Gneezy, Niederle and Rustichini, 2003; Gneezy and Rustichini, 2004; Datta Gupta, Poulsen and Villeval, 2005; Niederle and Vesterlund, 2007, 2010; Croson and Gneezy, 2009; Gneezy, Leonard and List, 2009; Wozniak, Harbaugh and Mayr, 2010) has provided evidence of a significant difference in gender attitudes and behaviors in such environments. First, women fail to perform as well as men in competitive versus non-competitive environments. Second, women shy away from environments in which they have to compete, despite the fact that no gender difference is found in performance doing the same task in non-competitive environments.

A separate line of research in social psychology has shown the power of priming in influencing attitudes and behavior. For example, Shih et al. (1999) demonstrated that Asian-American women performed better on a mathematics test when their ethnic identity was activated and worse when their gender identity was activated than a control group. They argue that the activation of ethnic versus gender stereotypes was responsible for these results.

We use insights taken from these two literatures to argue that gender-based family versus professional identities, activated through priming, may influence one’s preference for competition as well as performance under competition. In particular, we examined the effects of self-relevant identities on both women and men’s preference towards competition and their performance under competitive and noncompetitive environments. Priming was achieved via a questionnaire that subtly reminded of the identity of family roles and professional roles one play in life.

A laboratory experiment is carried out to examine these issues. MBA students enrolled in a prestigious business school participated in the experiment.The experimental design involves a two- (family- versus professional-identity priming) by-two (men vs. women) factorial design. Priming was achieved by administering questionnaires that concern either family or MBA-related issues prior to or after the completion of a real-effort task involving the addition of as many sets of five two-digit numbers as possible in a specified amount of time. In some rounds, participants must choose whether to be paid by a piece rate based on the number of problems correctly solved or by a tournament-like payment method based on their performance relative to other participants. In other rounds, the payment method was exogenously determined. We also collected data on attitudes toward competition and risk and each person’s beliefs about their relative ability, and use these measures as control variables in our analysis.

The results show that one’s gender, family/career priming, and their interaction all have significant impacts on one’s preference for competition, i.e., willingness to enter into a tournament compensation scheme while holding the characteristics of the task constant. After controlling for ability and skills relevant to the task, these results still hold. Moreover, for a given level of ability as measured by individual GMAT scores, men outperformed women in the imposed tournament round, while no gender effect was observed in performance under the piece-rate compensation scheme. Thus, our results demonstrated a stereotype-consistent shift in both men and women’s preference for competition, elicited by the prime, which changed participants’ lens of self-perception and led them to exhibit more stereotypically consistent behaviors. In particular, by priming family/career roles, female participants automatically adjusted their attitudes and preferences to be more in line with their gender salient social role in the family and career domain. We conclude that the potential role of dominant self-concept or self-identity in influencing one’s choices in life.

Competition is everywhere in socio-economic life. The implications of our results are profound. First, we show that internalized gender-based family role stereotypes can lead to magnified gender differences in professional performance in competitive environments. More importantly, we demonstrate that the decision to exit or shy away from competition made by many women in professional careers in contrast to the decision to embrace such environments by many men may be driven not by lack of ability nor by an inherent distaste for competition, but rather by societal gender-role priming in the form of stereotypical beliefs and attitudes that are activated by life events. In particular, such attitudes may be strongly activated as family role becomes more important in a person’s life through marriage, pregnancy and the bearing of children. A crucial question is whether it is possible to alter how women perceive and experience competition. We show that it is possible in our experimental setting. Activation of such internalized identities might not only drive the experimental results, but also have strong implications for career choices and job performance of women versus men, particularly once they become wives and mothers versus husbands and fathers.

Welcome to attend!