The Why Axis: Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life by Uri Gneezy, John List Read Free Book Online

the mating race. Since then, Darwin’s theory of natural selection has helped to explain why males are generally more aggressive and violent than females. After all, men had to go out and competewith men from other tribes to kill animals, while women raised and nurtured the young. The main idea is that the females’ cost of producing and raising offspring (such as pregnancy, birth, and nursing) is much higher than for males. Hence, males should compete to have as many offspring as they can, while females need to be choosy in their selection of the right male.
    If, as Darwin suggested, evolution is responsible for a comparative lack of competitiveness in females (Darwin didn’t write only about humans), a few hundred years of cultural changes would not make a difference. Evolution could help explain why the number of women in high-profile jobs still pales in comparison to that of their male counterparts, or why US women still only earn, on average, 80 cents for every dollar earned by a man.
    After citing the research and mentioning his “innate differences” hypothesis, Summers explicitly told his audience: “I’d like to be proven wrong on this one.”
    In this chapter and the one following, we will take up this challenge. In particular, we will examine what part of the gender gap in labor markets is due to culture. We couldn’t just take for granted, in the absence of data, that women were innately less competitive than men. We decided to start collecting evidence by looking at ordinary men and women in their natural habitats and doing things people do every day—say, participating in a gym class or answering job ads on Craigslist—and we used the full gamut of experimental tools at our disposal to answer these questions: To what degree are the differences between men and women (such as levels of aggression, competitive drive, and wage-earning power) truly innate? To what degree are they culturally learned? In the end, we’ve come up with a unique explanation for the persistent differences we observe between men and women, particularly when it comes to competition.
    But first, let’s take a closer look at why women, despite massive advances, still seem to be held back.
    How Much Do Women Compete?
    Our interest in gender roles and competitiveness began with the births of our own children. Soon after they were born, we began to notice differences among the girls, and between the girls and their brothers. While one of Uri’s girls was much more competitive than her sister, all of our girls always preferred dolls to their brothers’ trucks and baseballs. We began to ask ourselves the same question most parents of daughters ask: In a man’s world, what sort of chances would they have? Would they be able to play, and succeed in a culture in which the opportunities are still unequal, despite all the strides women have made? 3
    The sad fact is that while women are doing better than men in some areas, such as higher education, there is no reason to celebrate an upending of the millennia-old, male-dominated order of things just yet. In the United States and around the world, men still occupy the highest ranks of society. The proportion of women in the market workforce has risen from 48 percent in 1970 to 64 percent in 2011, 4 but only one in five senior management positions are held by women, and fewer than 4 percent of CEO positions in Fortune 500 companies. Some consider these facts as an achievement, since they are the highest in US history. Yet, women are still paid less than men for equivalent jobs. Even in public positions women still have not achieved parity. In Congress, for example, they still hold fewer than 17 percent of seats.
    Scholars have theorized for decades about the reasons why women can’t seem to make faster progress in breaking through the glass ceiling. Personally, we think that much of it boils down to this: men and women have different preferences for competitiveness, and they respond