The Why Axis: Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life by Uri Gneezy, John List Read Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Uri Gneezy, John List
have more impressive resumes than the men who applied for those same jobs.These findings seemed to underscore the fact that, when it comes to competition, men aren’t nearly as shy as women. 8
A successful career as a CEO demands a high level of engagement and responsiveness to competitive situations. No wonder, then, that so few women are at the top. Just Google the phrase “every man has his price,” and you’ll get lots of nice quotes about how every man can be bribed to do almost everything. But if you Google “every woman has her price”—well, that has a very different meaning.
Girls Against Boys
Larry Summers was not talking about entry-level jobs. He was talking about scientists. So what happens when smart female mathematicians and scientists compete against men? To find out, we asked groups of three men and three women to solve a series of mazes on a computer in exchange for money. 9 The setting was the Technion, the so-called MIT of Israel. It’s a tough school to get into, and men constitute 60 percent of the student body. The women at the Technion have to prove from their earliest years that they are every bit as good at math and science as the guys, the implicit assumption being that women have to work harder to show that they can be Einsteins, too.
One of the women in the experimental group was Ira (a common girls’ name for Russian immigrants in Israel). Ira was a brilliant student who had played computer games all her life, and she enjoyed technology and sophisticated technical concepts. She was born in Moscow and immigrated to Israel with her parents and older brother when she was ten. Even when she was young, math was her passion, so her decision to try to get into the Technion was not surprising. But being there wasn’t easy; she was the star of her math class in high school, but at the Technion, everyone was smart. She had to work extra hard and compete with other students to pass thecourses. Many less-committed students failed along the way and switched to less competitive fields. But Ira did well. She worked diligently, sleeping only four hours at night, and gave up her ballet practice. She knew she was going to make it.
Unlike some of her female peers, Ira didn’t feel discouraged by the idea of a career in science and technology. 10 Nevertheless, we wanted to know whether her gender-identification as a woman would affect her desire to compete for money in our experiment. Would she go all-out in a competitive game if incentives were involved?
In the experiments, participants were asked to solve as many mazes as they could in fifteen minutes, and receiving a dollar for every maze solved. When we then measured how well participants in these groups did, we found that the women performed pretty much the same as the men. But other groups of participants were given a competitive incentive: the person who solved the most mazes was paid proportionally more. In the heat of the battle, would Ira increase her effort?
It turned out that the male participants responded to the competitive incentive by significantly increasing the number of mazes they solved during the fifteen minutes, but Ira and the other women did not perform as well. In the competitive condition, the women solved, on average, the same number of mazes as they did in the noncompetitive one. The hypothesis that women are less competitive than men seemed to hold firm, even for Ira and the other bright women of the Technion.
In a later experiment, we mimicked something you might remember from your childhood. 11 Think about running as fast as you can alone, or next to someone else. If you are competitive, just having someone running next to you might motivate you to run faster and win an imaginary “race.” You just transformed an innocent situation into a competition. And if you’re less competitive, maybe you don’t care who’s next to you—you just run fast.
As you might have guessed, we wanted to test whether young boys and
A successful career as a CEO demands a high level of engagement and responsiveness to competitive situations. No wonder, then, that so few women are at the top. Just Google the phrase “every man has his price,” and you’ll get lots of nice quotes about how every man can be bribed to do almost everything. But if you Google “every woman has her price”—well, that has a very different meaning.
Girls Against Boys
Larry Summers was not talking about entry-level jobs. He was talking about scientists. So what happens when smart female mathematicians and scientists compete against men? To find out, we asked groups of three men and three women to solve a series of mazes on a computer in exchange for money. 9 The setting was the Technion, the so-called MIT of Israel. It’s a tough school to get into, and men constitute 60 percent of the student body. The women at the Technion have to prove from their earliest years that they are every bit as good at math and science as the guys, the implicit assumption being that women have to work harder to show that they can be Einsteins, too.
One of the women in the experimental group was Ira (a common girls’ name for Russian immigrants in Israel). Ira was a brilliant student who had played computer games all her life, and she enjoyed technology and sophisticated technical concepts. She was born in Moscow and immigrated to Israel with her parents and older brother when she was ten. Even when she was young, math was her passion, so her decision to try to get into the Technion was not surprising. But being there wasn’t easy; she was the star of her math class in high school, but at the Technion, everyone was smart. She had to work extra hard and compete with other students to pass thecourses. Many less-committed students failed along the way and switched to less competitive fields. But Ira did well. She worked diligently, sleeping only four hours at night, and gave up her ballet practice. She knew she was going to make it.
Unlike some of her female peers, Ira didn’t feel discouraged by the idea of a career in science and technology. 10 Nevertheless, we wanted to know whether her gender-identification as a woman would affect her desire to compete for money in our experiment. Would she go all-out in a competitive game if incentives were involved?
In the experiments, participants were asked to solve as many mazes as they could in fifteen minutes, and receiving a dollar for every maze solved. When we then measured how well participants in these groups did, we found that the women performed pretty much the same as the men. But other groups of participants were given a competitive incentive: the person who solved the most mazes was paid proportionally more. In the heat of the battle, would Ira increase her effort?
It turned out that the male participants responded to the competitive incentive by significantly increasing the number of mazes they solved during the fifteen minutes, but Ira and the other women did not perform as well. In the competitive condition, the women solved, on average, the same number of mazes as they did in the noncompetitive one. The hypothesis that women are less competitive than men seemed to hold firm, even for Ira and the other bright women of the Technion.
In a later experiment, we mimicked something you might remember from your childhood. 11 Think about running as fast as you can alone, or next to someone else. If you are competitive, just having someone running next to you might motivate you to run faster and win an imaginary “race.” You just transformed an innocent situation into a competition. And if you’re less competitive, maybe you don’t care who’s next to you—you just run fast.
As you might have guessed, we wanted to test whether young boys and
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