Previous research on gender and competition has often relied on laboratory tasks in which participants decide whether to compete for a fixed reward or withdraw. These short, controlled experiments have generally found that women are less likely than men to enter competitions. However, Andrej Angelovski, Associate Professor in Economics at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU), says such experiments represent a very particular type of competitive environment.
To examine competitiveness differently, Angelovski and co-authors Jordi Brandts from the Barcelona School of Economics and Werner Güth from the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods used an auction-style experiment. Rather than simply asking whether participants wanted to compete, the researchers measured how much they were willing to sacrifice to secure a desired job, offering a different way to capture the intensity of competition.
Over 32 rounds, participants bid for positions offering different salaries using Experimental Currency Units (ECU), later converted into euros. A bid represented the maximum amount of resources—such as effort, training or time—a participant was willing to sacrifice from the salary to obtain a position. Winners paid the second-highest bid in their group, while those who did not secure a position received a default payment of 50 ECU.
Participants competed in either “flat” companies, where salary differences between lower and higher positions were relatively small, or “steep” companies, where the gaps were much larger. Initially, groups of four competed for positions within their own company. Later, groups merged into markets of eight, allowing participants to compete for any available position.
The results challenge the conventional view that women are less competitive than men. Women competed just as strongly as men and, in some circumstances, even more aggressively. Both men and women generally underbid for the highest positions and showed a preference for middle-ranking jobs, with few significant gender differences. However, in flatter organisations, women accounted for most of the highest bids for top positions. “Now that we’ve changed how we study competition, we find the typical results no longer hold,” Angelovski says.
The study also uncovered a surprising cost associated with reaching the top. Although the highest positions offered the largest salaries, competition was so intense that successful bidders often sacrificed nearly all of the additional financial benefit. After accounting for the cost of winning, those securing top positions could end up no better off—and sometimes worse off—than participants who obtained middle-ranking jobs. Women were disproportionately represented among these top-position winners.
This finding was particularly striking because neither income nor social recognition fully explained the intense competition. Winners of middle-ranking positions consistently earned more than the 50 ECU benchmark, whereas winners of top positions did not. The experiment also removed the status normally associated with reaching the top because participants were not publicly identified as winners. Despite this, some participants remained willing to make substantial sacrifices for the highest positions.
The researchers stress that the experiment examines the “supply side”—people’s willingness to compete—rather than discrimination, institutional barriers or other factors affecting who ultimately reaches senior positions. The findings therefore challenge the idea that a lack of competitive ambition can explain women’s underrepresentation at the top. As Angelovski puts it, gender differences in senior positions are “not because women do not want to get there.”
More information: Andrej Angelovski et al, Bidding for better jobs: an experiment on gender differences in competitiveness without a real-effort task, Theory and Decision. DOI: 10.1007/s11238-026-10132-9
Journal information: Theory and Decision Provided by Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University