Bidding for better jobs: an experiment on gender differences in competitiveness without a real-effort task

There is evidence from experiments, using real-effort tasks and tournament incentives, documenting women performing worse than men under competition. We question whether this perhaps is due to the very particular way in which competition is typically studied in lab experiments. We alternatively model competitive behavior in firms by letting experimental participants compete in bidding for salaries (prizes) of different sizes in flat or steep organizational hierarchies. In our representation of job competition via a competitive bidding process, bids sum up, in a stylized way, various monetary aspects of how one competes for higher positions in organizations. Higher bidding for positions corresponds to behaving more competitively. We mostly find no statistically significant differences between women’s and men’s bidding. Women do win the top positions significantly more often, but there are no differences in earnings, the difference between salaries and bids. These results may function as a counterbalance to results finding women less willing to compete in head-to-head (real-effort) competition. One approach, real-effort versus pure choice, is not superior to the other. They likely yield complementary insights on the same issue, like we believe they do in this case.