The Why Axis: Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life (7 page)

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 differently to incentives. Our research shows that many women tend to avoid competitive settings and jobs in which salary is determined by relative rankings.

To illustrate, consider the following large-scale field experiment that we conducted on Craigslist.
⁵
In this experiment, we wanted to
directly
discover the factors that drive people to apply for entry-level jobs. How would men and women respond to different compensation scenarios? Would women go after jobs that required some competitiveness and risk-taking if the salary offered were higher?

To get some answers, we placed two ads on Internet job boards in sixteen cities for an administrative assistant, one of the most common jobs in the United States. An example of one of our job postings in Seattle read as follows:

               
P
OSTING
C
ATEGORY
: admin/office jobs

               
T
ITLE
: Seeking Sports News Assistant

               
The Becker Center is seeking a Seattle-area administrative assistant to help gather information on sports stories in the Seattle region. While the Becker Center is based in Chicago, we have a satellite project in Seattle. The assistant will provide us with up-to-date information on local news and views on basketball, football, baseball, soccer, Nascar, golf, tennis, hockey and other sports. Responsibilities for the position include reading local sports-related news coverage (pro, semi-pro, and college) and preparing short reports. The successful candidate will also be comfortable with typical administrative duties—light correspondence, proofreading, filing, email and phone communication, etc.

               
C
OMPENSATION
: Hourly

Our second job description looked almost identical to this one, but it didn’t mention sports. Instead, the description noted, “The assistant will provide us with up-to-date information on community events, arts and culture, business, entertainment, policy issues, crime, and other stories. Responsibilities for the position include
seeking out, reading, and summarizing local news stories and preparing short reports.”

Over a period of four months, nearly 7,000 interested job seekers applied for these jobs listed in the various cities.
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Upon responding to our ad, some were told that they would be paid on an hourly basis, while others were told that their pay would depend on how they performed compared to a coworker.

Our goal was to see if the competitive aspect influenced one sex more than the other.
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What do you think we found after placing several months of ads on Craigslist? Which sex continued to show interest in our job after being told of the wage structure?

Not surprisingly, guys were more interested in the sports-oriented ad and women responded to the non-sports-oriented ad: whereas 53.8 percent of the job seekers for the sports-related job were women, 80.5 percent of those responding to the alternate job were female.

But the real differences showed up when we described the compensation schemes. According to one scheme, the job would pay a flat $15 per hour. Not too shabby for an entry-level office administration gig. The competitive pay scheme, on the other hand, rewarded the workers based on how they performed in relation to a coworker. Applicants were told that they would be paid $12 per hour but would be compared to another worker, and whichever of the two performed better would receive a bonus of $6 per hour in addition to the $12-per-hour base pay. In this way, each of the two compensation schemes paid an average of $15 per worker, but one was highly incentivized, whereas the other was not.

You might be surprised (and saddened) by the actual gender breakdown of who applied for each kind of job. In general, women didn’t like the competitive option; in fact, they were 70 percent less likely than men to go after the competitive job. Further, the women who
did
apply for the highly incentivized job tended to 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.
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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 the
courses. 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.
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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 girls would have different competitive tendencies. To do so, we went to visit some fourth-grade schoolkids in Israel. In a physical education class, we first asked kids to run forty meters on a track, one at a time. After the teacher timed the individual students’ results, the students who ran at similar speeds raced against each other. We didn’t offer incentives, and we didn’t even tell the kids that this was a competition. The kids simply had to run neck and neck.

As we found in the Technion maze experiment, the boys ended up reacting more strongly to the competitive environment, running faster than when they had run alone. The girls, again, didn’t seem to react to the heightened competition. They ran about as fast as when they had run alone—even when they were competing against only against girls. Once more, it looked like girls didn’t do as well in a competitive context.

Eventually our research led us to visit the most patriarchal and matrilineal societies in the world. This approach was meant to provide some preliminary insights on how cultural influences shape competitive preferences.

One frosty night a few years back, in a heavy dose of male bonding, we were sitting around playing poker with a bunch of other guys in College Park, Maryland. Between cigar chomps and shots of whisky, we asked ourselves why most women didn’t seem to enjoy these oh-so-fun activities as much as we did. But, more importantly, we also wondered about the results of the experiments conducted at the Technion and in the school. Were women simply born to dislike competition, or did society influence their tastes and preferences? Was the lack of competitiveness inherent in women or a learned behavior? If the latter, exactly what did nurture—or the
fact that culture might be linked to their competitive inclinations—have to do with their learning? And if the differences turned out to be socialized, would our daughters have a fair shot at succeeding in a competitive society?

There was only one way to find out. We had to get away from Western society. With support from the National Science Foundation, we set out to test assumptions about biologically based competitiveness in two of the most culturally different places on the planet. We conducted experiments in a society in which women held virtually no power, and in one in which they ran the show. We literally went to the ends of the earth to tease out the question that Freud, Darwin, and numerous other psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists after them have theorized about, but have had difficulty testing.

In the process, we were able to develop scientific experiments that permitted us a unique glimpse into women’s behavior in markets across extremely different societies that held women in diametrically opposite roles. In exploring the underpinnings of their behavior, we gained insight into this question:
Are women from every walk of life less competitively inclined than men?