Gender, Stereotypes, and Competitive Performance Gap: An Experimental Investigation

ABSTRACT

This study investigates how participants in competition react to gender stereotypes in performance. We propose two novel gender‐oriented tasks: clicking as a male‐oriented task and face recall as a female‐oriented task with two treatment conditions, which can strengthen shared gender stereotypes and foster gender competition. The gender performance gap in these two tasks clearly exists in the baseline and prevails across treatments, while it disappears or widens affected by our conditions. We clearly observe the positive effect of winning in both tasks. This comes from losers' performance changes: The performance of losers with a dominated stereotype deteriorated in the dominated task. Our results suggest that task stereotypes affect performance of dominated groups, discouraging losers, with potential implications for productivity in competitive workplaces.